[ubl-lcsc] Joint NDR/LC calls Tuesday and Wednesday

[Jon Bosak <Jon.Bosak@sun.com>]

As you all know, some concerns have arisen regarding the current
form of the UBL 0p70 schemas.  Since my primary role in this
effort is organization and marketing, I generally don't try to
manage the technical side, and until today my 50,000-foot
impression was that the current discussion was primarily about the
verbosity of fully qualified names, an issue that in itself does
not overly concern me.  I now realize something that should have
caught my attention earlier, which is that the current names are
not just really long but are now also structured in a way that
prevents code reuse.  This should have been obvious, and would
have been obvious if I had caught Bill Burcham's messages to the
NDR list last week, but the importance of the problem has become
clear to me only through findings posted by Ken Holman to the LC
list Sunday as a result of his attempt to make stylesheets
conforming to the schemas:

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-lcsc/200301/msg00085.html
   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-lcsc/200301/msg00089.html

Based on these messages, and also on Ken's comments in Monday's LC
SC call, it appears that the current naming method will create
serious problems for implementers -- problems of a different order
than just assigning enough memory space.

I am always ready to tell implementers that later changes to a
specification in progress may require them to rewrite their
prototypes, but I hesitate to put out for review something that
may make it too hard to create prototypes in the first place.  So
before we go public with the schemas in their present form, I'd
like us to revisit this issue together.

For this purpose, I'm asking that a portion of tomorrow's regularly
scheduled LC meeting (8-10 a.m. California time Tuesday 21 January
2003) and the next day's regularly scheduled NDR meeting
(8:30-10:30 a.m. California time Wednesday 22 January) be joint
LC/NDR meetings devoted to this topic.  I've listed the times and
dial-in numbers below.

Under ordinary circumstances, this would be Tim McGrath's decision,
but he's been called away on personal business and can't be
reached right now.  I hope very much that he will be back in range
for these joint conference calls.  Marion Royal is chairing LC SC
in Tim's absence, but I came to this understanding too late to
call him Monday night; I hope he will forgive my adding this issue
to his Tuesday morning LC review agenda.

The biggest unresolved question appears to be whether it's
actually necessary to have multiple uniquely named elements for
things that are bound to the same type:

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-ndrsc/200301/msg00068.html

I think that we need to be absolutely sure of the necessity for
this before we give up on easy code reuse.  If it's not necessary,
then we need to estimate what would be required to fix this
without seriously putting the release further behind.

Another technical question that needs to be resolved is the use of
namespaces:

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-ndrsc/200301/msg00072.html

Dial-in info:

   LC SC call Tuesday 21 January 2003 8-10 a.m. PST
   U.S. Dial In Number: 877 494 5165
   Int'l Access/Caller Paid Dial In Number: 405 319 0674
   PARTICIPANT CODE: 133929

   NDR SC call Wednesday 22 January 2003 8:30-10:30 a.m. PST
   U.S. Dial In Number: 888 422 7116
   Int'l Access/Caller Paid Dial In Number: 608 250 1828
   PARTICIPANT CODE: 398769

Jon