[legalxml-courtfiling] versioning recommendation for JXDDS

["John M. Greacen" <john@greacen.net>]

Please find attached a proposal from GTRI for versioning rules for the
JXDDS (I think it means Justice XML Data Dictionary Schema).  This is
the effort to build the justice-wide data dictionary to which we in
Legal XML have been contributing for over a year, and from which we took
the "reconciled" elements for ECFS 1.1.  The plan now is to convert the
existing data dictionary of reconciled elements (which will be called
JXDD 1.0) into a schema (which will be called JXDDS 2.0), then into a
schema using the upper camel case tag convention (which will be called
JXDDS 2.1), then into a schema with elements based on an object oriented
approach (which will be called JXDDS 3.0), and then into an RDF that
will fully define the relationships among data elements (which will be
called JXDDS 4.0).

I append below my comments on the versioning proposal.  I would
appreciate any additional input that you would like for me to have in
commenting further on this proposal.  You will note that this may
require us to adopt these versioning rules for our own specifications.
What are your views?  Would we use this approach if required to do so?
Would we want to use it anyway in place of our current approach, which
only distinguishes future releases of ECFS 1.1 by date of issuance?
That has produced significant confusion in the past.

John's comments:

Webb -- I have a few comments and suggestions.  First a general comment
about the use of pdfs as the format for the recommendations.  It is very
hard to make comments on a pdf document.  See my clumsy approach below
-- to identify the topic, the paragraph and the sentence within the
paragraph.  But anyone reading that will have to go back to the original
and count through the paragraphs and sentences to find what I am
referring to.  If I were another participant, it wouldn't be worth the
effort to do that.  Is there an easier way?  Like using Word, or even
email, in which we could cut and paste sentences or paragraphs and show
our suggestions in context?

Use of  "schema" throughout the document.  Shouldn't we use
"specification" rather than "schema" in many places (where we are not
referring to a specific example using schema)?  We are planning to
migrate to RDF and W3C will undoubtedly come up with something more
sophisticated than RDF in time.  This same versioning process should
apply to all XML specifications, whether schemas or RDFs or whatevers.

Compatibility between versions - 2d paragraph, third sentence.
Shouldn't 7.12 be 7.12.3?  As I understand your rules, an XML
specification could not just specify 7.12.  If it did, what would be the
effect? -- that it would be verifiable against any 7.12 version, which
would mean that it did not require any of the additional features added
after version 7.12.1?  If so, it should specify 7.12.1 which has that
same effect.  Right?

Representation in Schemas - 7th paragraph, second sentence.  Shouldn't
"simple" be "simply"?

Rationale:  Requirements:  I gather from this discussion that all XML
specifications that reference the JXDDS must use the same versioning
rules.  While I think your versioning scheme makes good sense, it is not
the one we are using in the OASIS Electronic Court Filing Technical
Committee today.  Please clarify your intention here.

--
John M. Greacen
Greacen Associates, LLC.
18 Fairly Road
Santa Fe, NM  87507
505-471-0203

Attachment: issue-2.0.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document