How do intent names get into the SCA namespace?

[ashok malhotra <ashok.malhotra@oracle.com>]

I was given an action item to investigate how intent names ( qualified 
and unqualified) get into the SCA namespace?
Strictly speaking, namespaces collect only the names of elements defined 
in a XML Schema in the namespace declared in the schema.  However, there 
are many other situations where names need to be collected in a 
namespace.  Currently, the way to do so is to just say so!

Some years ago, I authored a spec that defined functions and operators 
to be defined on XQuery and XPath 2.0.
We wanted to get the function names into a namespace so we could refer 
to them using the QName syntax such as fn:add.  So, what did we do?  We 
wrote text that said, in effect, these functions are in this namespace.

So, what I recommend is that we add a statement in the SCA Policy 
Framework spec that says, in the section that introduces intents: "names 
of intents, both qualified and unqualified defined in this specification 
are included in the general SCA namespace ..."

FWIW:  There is a spec working its way through W3C that would allow any 
collection of names to be included in a namespace and referred to using 
the QName syntax but it is not a spec yet and so we cannot rely on it.
-- 
All the best, Ashok