Genericode Standard for Formally Defining Enumerated Values?

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>]

While I think the controlled values proposal will be very useful and may 
be appropriate for also defining the effective values for unconstrained 
enumerated attributes, I think we should also look at the OASIS 
Genericode standard as well, as it may be more appropriate for this 
particular use or may be something that can work with the controlled 
values proposal in a useful way. See http://www.genericode.org/

Tony Coates gave a nice 6.3 minute presentation on Genericode at XML 
2007 (one of the lightning round presentations) and it seemed like just 
the thing. However, it is still under development so that may make it 
unavailable for immediate consideration for 1.2

It seems like a very simple solution to the general problem of simply 
defining sets of "codes" (that is, distinct values within some domain) 
and relating individual code values to some governing definition (e.g., 
a set of topics used in the service of defining a set of controlled 
values).

Genericode has been used with SchemaTron to do provide second-pass 
validation for things like UBL, which uses genericode to define sets of 
codes that must vary by user, country, business domain, and so on.

 From what I've seen, it seems like it would be pretty straightforward 
for editing tools, for example, to integrate support for 
genericode-defined value sets into a DITA-specific authoring environment 
given a little bit of configuration (e.g., for this 
shell/specialization, use this code set definition for this 
type/attribute pair).

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
Main: 610.631.6770
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