Public Comment

[comment-form@oasis-open.org]

Comment from: walter@hamscher.com

Name: Walter Hamscher
Title: At-large Member, Steering Committee
Organization:  XBRL International 
Regarding Specification: OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ) Version 3.0 dated 2006-04-13

I fully agree with the position stated by Hugh Wallis, which I repeat below.  I further note that coordination on this matter is required by the mutual signatures affixed to the Interoperability Pledge to which both OASIS and XBRL International agreed to in December 2001 and have never rescinded.

Because the W3C has not defined a normative schema for the namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink, the OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ) TC have found it necessary to create one (xLink.xsd) for use by this specification. The same need has been found in XBRL and, I would imagine, in any other system that makes use of the XML Schema and the XLink specifications. In the CIQ schema there are a number of attribute group declarations (which therefore purport to belong to the namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink) that are then referenced elsewhere in the set of schemas. However, these attribute groups are nowhere defined as belonging to the namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink by the owners of that namespace (the W3C) in the specification which defines it (i.e. XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.0
W3C Recommendation 27 June 2001 - http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/).

Consequences of this are that interoperability with other standards and/or environments in which the XLink standard is used is compromised. Specifically, where others have of necessity created their own schemas in order to implement the XLink standard, a namespace clash will most likely occur. This is, indeed, the case with the XBRL standard which, as mentioned earlier, has also been required to define its own schemas to implement the XLink standard.

I recommend to the OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ) TC to review the XLink implementation in this standard with these considerations in mind and to confine the definitions contained in the implementation of the namespace http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/ to those defined in the relevant standard  (i.e. XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.0
W3C Recommendation 27 June 2001 - http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/).