Public comment on V3.0 of CIQ specs.

["Ram Kumar" <kumar.sydney@gmail.com>]

CIQ TC,

Please see the public comment from XBRL group.

Regards,

Ram

Subject: Public Comment

From: comment-form@oasis-open.org
To: ciq-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Date: 9 Jun 2006 15:25:32 -0000

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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never rescinded.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/).