Re: [ubl-dev] How others handle minor version URIs

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

Jon,

What I'm seeing here at the Grants.gov project is the use of namespace as
below (see link at bottom).

This has severe long term negative connotations across a community of users
including diverse agencies and external grant bodies.  No one has really
thought this thru - except to step out and bravely go where no man has
bravely gone before... but clearly by this time next year they will be
facing an explosion of minor and major versions for a variety of changes,
forms, enhancements and fixes - and the downstream software will be tasked
with somehow keeping up with this and not breaking.

Frankly - schema is not the answer to sustained longterm effective
versioning to the element and attribute level within XML structures - and
especially since there is no support for role and context that core
components are built around.

While the W3C made certain decisions WRT schema design - that did not
include eBusiness information management needs - simply because those use
cases are not front and center of the W3C technology vision.  Clearly schema
was a major design departure from the original XML structure work and and
two orders of magnitude of complexity higher.

Fortunately there is a better answer - through the use of ebXML Registry and
UID semantic references that can reach down to the attribute and element
level and provide elegant versioning on demand.

Better yet - in a fully distributed SOA environment the Registry provides
the means to fully communicate across participant systems in realtime and
provide version based agility.

I believe OASIS and CEFACT have it within their grasp to develop such clear,
simple and powerful mechanisms; and mechanisms that also effectively support
localization, context and role - something that mono-lingual communities
like Grants.gov are not even close to addressing.  Such Registry work is
underway - and the UBL community can help energize this work and give it
clear focus and use cases.

Through the 1980's the EDI community grappled with the thorn of versioning.
We identified in that work that the only effective answer to versioning was
to develop registry facilities to allow realtime sharing of definitions and
content structure layouts (see DISA X12 Future Vision work from 1995/6).
That vision carried over into the foundation work of the XML/edi Group and
then ebXML.  While UBL has drawn from many aspects of ebXML - it has
strangely been reluctant to embrace this central plank that has always been
at the heart of the ebXML technology.  Given the CEFACT efforts now underway
to develop Registry-based systems from each of its member countries business
information semantics - it seems a natural next step for UBL to base its
versioning around registry enabled systems, not static and limited W3C
schema.

Enjoy, DW

============== click on link for example of versioning a la schema
===========================

WARNING: This content may cause you to feel dizzy and have shortness of
breath / difficulty breathing:

http://apply.grants.gov/system/schemas/applicant/MetaGrantApplication.xsd

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <jon.bosak@sun.com>
To: <ubl-dev@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 5:34 PM
Subject: [ubl-dev] How others handle minor version URIs


> Hello ubl-dev,
>
> We're gearing up for a discussion of minor versioning strategy in
> the UBL TC next week, and we have a question for you: how do other
> major schema development efforts handle namespace URIs in minor
> versions? Do they keep the same namespace URI in the minor version
> that was used in the major version from which it derives, or do
> they change the namespace URI to reflect the revision?  (This is
> not a question about which approach should be used but rather
> which approach *is* used.  If someone wants to start up a
> discussion about which approach *should* be used, that would be
> great, but please employ a different subject line.)
>
> Jon
>
>
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