Re: [emergency] GJXDM vs EDXL Distribution isses

[Art Botterell <acb@incident.com>]

At 9:34 AM -0500 12/29/04, Ham, Gary A wrote:
>To be GJXDM compliant we would probably have to change the "eventType"
>to something more akin to "EmergencyEventTypeCode"...

I'm not sure whether "compliant" is the right criterion.  Our 
functional goal is "compatible"... framing it in terms of compliance 
transforms a technical issue into a political one.  I'm not sure 
that's either necessary or wise.

Not necessary because we have the mechanism of namespaces to allow 
domain-specific element design choices to be made "close to the 
ground," nearer to functional concerns and farther from bureaucratic 
ones.  It gives us a viable alternative to the 
grand-unified-data-model-of-everything approach, which I'm afraid may 
be self-defeating in its scope.

And not wise for several reasons:

1) Adopting a stance of "compliance" to one user group... in this 
case, the justice community... necessarily distances us a bit from 
others... fire, transportation, health, etc.  While I realize that 
Justice is ascendant in post-9/11 America, we're part of an 
international standards organization and those of us who've been at 
this for awhile have seen these trends shift back and forth over the 
decades.

2) There's a learning curve here.  As Gary points out, just because 
the GJXDM was the earliest and largest doesn't mean it got everything 
right.  We need to leave the door open for learning and improvement. 
(After all, the US had the first color television standard in the 
world... and as a result spent the next forty years looking at the 
worst color tv pictures in the world.)

3) As mentioned above, the wider the scope of a data model, the more 
technical and political inertia it accumulates.  Keeping a degree of 
compartmentalization lends flexibility, so long as there's a 
mechanism (e.g., namespaces) for preventing collisions.

Now I'm not arguing against adopting an ISO 11179-based naming 
scheme.  I'm just suggesting that we ought to think carefully and 
explicitly before slipping into an assumption that we're somehow 
obliged to comply with some other group's scheme.

- Art
-- 
Art Botterell
Common Alerting Protocol Program Manager
Partnership for Public Warning
www.PartnershipForPublicWarning.org
(707) 750-1006