Re: [emergency] Advisory Note Concerning a Mechanism for ThreatAdvisory Messages

[Eliot Christian <echristi@usgs.gov>]

At 07:03 AM 4/11/2003 -0700, John Aerts wrote:
>[...] I would recommend that we change the <tags> in the example to the
>equivalent tags from the Justice XML Data Dictionary (JXDD) since it is
>sponsored by the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dept. of Justice.

We certainly expect messages to use different tags across applications,
and many messages will be communicated using mechanisms that do not have
element tags at all (e.g., Web pages, e-mail messages, voice messages, etc.).

The whole point of exposing a data dictionary is to enable applications
to align elements by what they mean (semantic level), rather than trying
to standardize the format (syntactic level) or characters (lexical level).

>Yes, I realized that the JXDD only became available for your review today
>but equivalent tags should be included for our use.

I agree that it is a worthwhile objective to assure that the CAP elements
are well-defined. It is also worthwhile that CAP elements either re-use
definitions given in JXDD, or that JXDD records those that are peculiar
to CAP. If you have an equivalence table between CAP and JXDD, it would
be good to seek consensus on that equivalence across both communities.

I firmly believe our objective must be to standardize only "the minimum
number of things that have to be the same, sop that everything else can
be different". The more things we try to standardize, the less sustainable
will be our standards.

Eliot