OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

emergency message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


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


Hi,
 
Would one of you be interested in coming to GeoWeb and giving a workshop on Emergency Response Standards and Technologies?  You could cover NIEM, EDXL, CAP etc.
 
Let me know what you think.
 
Cheers

Ron


From: Gary Ham [mailto:gham@grandpaham.com]
Sent: Sat 3/13/2010 10:40 PM
To: David RR Webber (XML)
Cc: Lee Tincher; emergency@lists.oasis-open.org; Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL; McGarry,Donald P.
Subject: Re: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas



Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 14, 2010, at 12:04 AM, "David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info> wrote:

Lee,
 
This is precisely what having a CAM template is doing for you.  Every item in your bullet points.
 
But instead of someone having to guess at which optional items you are omitting - or restrictions you have added to extensible items - or code values - these are all documented in the template in a formal manner that is machine parsible - and allows you to generate the human readable documentation as well.
 
BTW - this is all intensely deja vu - I went back and looked at how EDI defined interoperability - and it is precisely in terms of Implementation Conventions - "IC's" - aka profiles and templates. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Thanks, DW
 
 
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs.
Released Schemas
From: "Lee Tincher" <ltincher@evotecinc.com>
Date: Sat, March 13, 2010 11:25 pm
To: "'McGarry, Donald P.'" <dmcgarry@mitre.org>, "'David RR Webber
(XML)'" <david@drrw.info>
Cc: <emergency@lists.oasis-open.org>, "'Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL'"
<Sukumar_Dwarkanath@sra.com>

These are the guidelines we have been using (this one is for HAVE – but applies to all of our profile work)
 

The following are the attributes of a HAVE Haiti Profile message that are required:

 

·         A HAVE Haiti Profile message must NOT become a new or additional “standard” (e.g. another Hospital Availability standard or another HAVE 1.0 “version”).

·         A HAVE Haiti Profile message must NOT be a Proprietary Format.

·         A HAVE Haiti Profile message must comply with the HAVE 1.0 standard.

o   A HAVE Haiti Profile message must validate against the HAVE 1.0 standard schema.

o   A HAVE Haiti Profile message must validate within the HAVE 1.0 standard namespace with no changes to root elements.

o   A HAVE Haiti Profile message must use all required elements (i.e. no deletion of required elements are allowed).

o   A HAVE Haiti Profile message must not change attributes for required fields.

 

The following are recommendations for clarity:

 

·         A HAVE Haiti Profile message may further constrain the HAVE 1.0 standard.*
(* may be thought of as a “constraint schema” against the standard)

·         A HAVE Haiti Profile message may add to required element definitions.*
(* only to extend or interpret the definition)

·         A HAVE Haiti Profile message may limit size of required elements.

·         A HAVE Haiti Profile message may exclude optional elements.

·         A HAVE Haiti Profile message may use optional elements in a specific way – as defined for the profile.

 
Thanks,
Lee
 
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.  ~Bill Beattie
 
From: McGarry, Donald P. [mailto:dmcgarry@mitre.org]
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 2:09 PM
To: David RR Webber (XML)
Cc: emergency@lists.oasis-open.org; Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas
 
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
 
From: David RR Webber (XML) [mailto:david@drrw.info]
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 1:40 PM
To: McGarry, Donald P.
Cc: emergency@lists.oasis-open.org; Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas
 
Don,
 
I hear you but I don't believe that a standard can guarantee interoperability - and especially not through the use of XSD schema alone.  May be if there is only one XML instance that everyone has to adher to - but that is not what people expect.
 
Notice OASIS standards in general - provide the schema framework for the exchange content - implementers expect to have to test conformance (see Drummond Group work on OASIS conformance testing) and declare interoperability - and someone can still send you something that passes the schema but breaks your backend application.
 
And to Gary's point - yes - optional is not the schema default - but most standards use optional since the context is unknown and rather than have a situation where a required element is being fudged - its made optional.  CIQ is a point in case - which part of an address is required?  That is impossible to determine for all 207 postal authorities and then in country mail handling.  E.g. USA has 5 possible address formats that the USPS will accept.
 
Mentioning context - that is another weakness in XSD Schema design - no explicit context mechanism - that allows you to control when something is mandatory or optional.  You will be shocked to know that OASIS CAM has explicit context mechanisms - so you can dynamically control that.
 
Don - at this point in the process here - the schema is what it is.  My suggest is to augment that with additional profile tools that can provide the types of interoperability measures you are looking for.
 
BTW - OASIS CIQ now have the v3 format which is a significant improvement on matching addressing needs and removing the ugly from CIQ v2. 
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 12:34 pm
To: "David RR Webber (XML)" <david@drrw.info>,
"Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL" <Sukumar_Dwarkanath@sra.com>
Cc: "emergency@lists.oasis-open.org" <emergency@lists.oasis-open.org>

David-
By this assessment what distinguishes a standard from a common data dictionary?  I envision a standard as defining interoperability in that if two systems have never “met” before being able to expect exactly what the other system is generating so that they can generate messages for data sharing and process the other messages system.  By this assessment, if I go by the schemas I have to implement the entire xPIL standard, if I go by the HAVE document, I’m not exactly sure what out of xPIL I have to implement, which means that I could conceivably represent my Hospital’s location information by its stock ticker symbol.  I don’t think this is what we intended to do as a TC.  If we all go off making our own tailored profiles, then when our two systems meet we will discover they can’t interoperate because the “MITRE” profile only works with stock symbols, while the “Other” profile only works with Membership information.  This doesn’t seem like what a standard is supposed to do.
 
-Don
Office: 315-838-2669
Cell: 315-383-1197
 
From: David RR Webber (XML) [mailto:david@drrw.info]
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 12:20 PM
To: Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL
Cc: McGarry, Donald P.; emergency@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas
 
Don,
 
You are encountering the limitation of schema itself.  Everything has to be defined as optional.
 
If you are following the NIEM IEPD approach - you would publish your IEPD and subset schemas as your profile.
 
The CAM toolkit provides full support for this. 
 
Ingest the HAVE XSD into CAM template - tailor that as you desire - use excludeTree() rules to prune out pieces you don't need (to match EDXL conformance) - and then add other rules as desired to show dependencies on other parts that you do, and or your content restrictions.  Then run File / Export / Compress process - to complete your template.  You can then generate the subset schema, via File / Export / Template to XSD - to build either a flattened schema, or a NIEM compliant subset schema (depending on what type of application development tooling you are using).
 
You can also build the business documentation, XML examples, cross-reference to NIEM spreadsheet and NIEM wantlist - all as required for NIEM IEPD publishing.
 
This gives you a true complete profile of your use of EDXL HAVE, derived from the original OASIS schema. 
 
Interoperability is then dependent on the conformance to that profile. 
 
There is also the CAMV engine - which you can use in lieu of schema checks for production runtime.  This has added benefit of providing graduated failure levels - error, warning, info - rather than the XSD which only has error.  This allows you to tailor the runtime actions of your backend systems to respond to differences in XML instances.  An upcoming Developerworks article will be covering this with an example use case.
Thanks, DW
 
 

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs.
Released Schemas
From: "Dwarkanath, Sukumar - INTL" <Sukumar_Dwarkanath@sra.com>
Date: Tue, March 09, 2010 10:08 am
To: "McGarry, Donald P." <dmcgarry@mitre.org>,
<emergency@lists.oasis-open.org>

Don,
 
The restrictions on using CIQ were considered to be business rules and the intention was not create a profile as far as I remember. I am not against creating a CIQ Profile but if we go down that path, we should consider requirements across the other standards such as EDXL RM, DE etc. We have dealt with this particular issue quite a few times and it is a balance – offering flexibility vs ensuring interoperability.
 
Sukumar
 
 
 

From: McGarry, Donald P. [mailto:dmcgarry@mitre.org]
Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 8:31 AM
To: emergency@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas
 
All-
After spending some time doing some coding this weekend I noticed something that we may want to address:
  1. HAVE uses xPil which in turn uses xAL and xNL
  2. We included the full schemas for all of these referenced schemas on the OASIS page to download the standards.
 
I think the problem here is that when I went to implement this the documentation states that we are using a “profile” recommendation to limit the choices for xPil to “maximize interoperability”.  It then goes on to state that <have:Organization> should have the sub-elements OrganizationInformation and OrginizationGeoLocation. 
OrganizationInformation should have the sub-elements as defined in the CIQ standard:
  • OrganisationName
  • OrganisationInfo
  • Addresses
  • ContactNumbers
  • CommentText
 
It also states that we won’t use georss but will use the gml in the OrganizationGeoLocation Section.
It also refers me to Appendix C which suggests that I refer to the CIQ TC website, and also states that for the purpose of HAVE the naming & location elements are used.  The use of other elements is left to implementation choices
 
Conformance is defined in the document as:
  1. Validating to the schema
  2. Meets the mandatory requirements of section 3
 
My concern is that the referenced xPil schemas (and in turn the xAL and xNL) are the FULL SCHEMAS.  There is no restriction in the HAVE schema enforcing our smaller profile of CIQ.  Additionally the reference to the georss namespace or elements was not removed.  Furthermore, the document is somewhat confusing in that it states what elements to use, but then tells the develop that it’s an implementation choice whether to use the other elements or not.  Right now as it stands I can generate an XML document that has a bunch of xPIL fields that we didn’t include in our documentation, but will validate against our schemas.  With the vagueness in the document I could argue that this was an implementation choice and my document is valid according to the conformance section, but I suspect my document may break some systems.
 
So which is it?  If I am building an XML processor to ingest HAVE documents I need to know what to expect.  If I need to be prepared to handle Accounts, Documents, Revenues, Stocks, etc. as defined in xPIL because some system out there decided that they wanted to do it, that makes HAVE more heavyweight that I think the designers intended.  If indeed we are using a CIQ “profile” we should develop the schema for that profile and post it with the standard and add some more info to our documentation so it isn’t as vague.  I’ll upload my generated sample file as HAVE_FullToSchemaButNotDocument.xml to the TC page so you can check it out.  This example validated against the schemas from our page.  I added in Geo-RSS as well (which will validate if you reference the georss schema)…
 
Don McGarry
Office: 315-838-2669
Cell: 315-383-1197
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this mail list, you must leave the OASIS TC that generates this mail. Follow this link to all your TCs in OASIS at: https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/portal/my_workgroups.php


[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]