RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas

["David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Don,

 

But interoperability does NOT happen just because you publish a Schema!

 

Notice HTML is DTD based - and the "your mileage may vary" there is infamous.

 

Likewise SOAP - ever seen this as a SOAP message?

 

 <SOAP>

    <payload/>

 </SOAP>

 

And XSLT works consistently in Saxon - but Oracle and Microsoft and IBM have varients that won't run each others code.

 

A lot of those other standards are not even XSD based.  It's the formal specifications and the interpretation of those into the implementation.  And its a continuous process. Implementers will find improvements - just as we're doing now.

 

Same with 802.11 - what has made them work is a ton of graft by engineers including Cisco's to make sure their stuff works together - mostly - notice for 802.11 there is B, N, G, et al and best results are obtained when all devices are from the same vendor.

 

It's nice having a schema - but I don't think anyone expects that just because their XML conforms to the schema it will magically interoperate with everyone else.  And I've not even mentioned the thorny subject of codelists and values that the schema may contain.

 

The whole point of publishing a profile is that you can at least inform people, and document for your own purposes - exactly how your implementation is built.  I'm not saying that profiles solve world hunger - but they are a useful tool that allow people to better understand how to use the standard for a given community of interest.  And even the example of a standard that you cited, 802.11, has profiles - that vendors then adher to!!!  So the idea is not that everyone run off and create their own profiles - but that collaborators work toward concensus on shared profiles.

 

For example - if VA hospitals published a profile for their use of EDXL - would you condemn that and say they should not have done it?

Thanks, DW

 

 

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs.
Released Schemas
From: "McGarry, Donald P." <dmcgarry@mitre.org>
Date: Tue, March 09, 2010 2:09 pm
To: "David RR Webber (XML)" <david@drrw.info>
Cc: "emergency@lists.oasis-open.org" <emergency@lists.oasis-open.org>,
"Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL" <Sukumar_Dwarkanath@sra.com>

I’m sorry...Standards are to guarantee interoperability.  That’s why they are called standards.

 

HTML, HTTP, XML, TCP, UDP, IP, 802.11,  XHTML, Unicode, CSS, SOAP, WSDL, XSLT, XML Schema, Ethernet, DNS, Arp, RIP, ICMP, Telnet, FTP, SMTP to name a few.

 

What if cisco made their own profile for RIP?

What if Sun made their own profile for TCP/IP in unix?

 

EDXL-HAVE and RM need to work without a developer pow-wow beforehand.  It’s not CIQ’s fault, we just copy-pasted their schema.  If we’re all gonna go off and make our own profiles…why have the standard?  I think when you combine the context above standards list into what the “internet” is today you see why…The TC’s official answer to documentation issues and referenced schemas shouldn’t be to tell developers to go off and make their own profiles…I think we are just shooting ourselves in the foot.

 

NIEM is not a standard…it’s a standard process model for developing data interchanges based on standard terminology; similar to what goes on in a TC, or in Engineering shops across the world every day, it’s a great process and model for developing defined data interchanges based on a common dataset and allowing for cross organization reuse. 

 

 

-Don

Office: 315-838-2669

Cell: 315-383-1197

dmcgarry@mitre.org