[ubl-ndrsc] MINUTES: Joint NDR/LCCSC 4 Feb 2003

The following are the minutes from today's joint meeting. Please, Arofan, Bill, Eve, and others, read through them carefully, either comment by email or joint the call tomorrow afternoon. We appreciate having your input.

Roll call:
Jon Bosak
Dave Carlson
Mavis Cournane
Mark Crawford
Fabrice Desre
Lisa Seaburg
Eduardo Gutentag
Bill Meadows
Mike Adcock
Gareth Minikawa
Paul Thorpe
Kevin ?
Dan Vint
Alan Stitzer
Jim Wilson
Sue Probert
Marion Royal
Gunther Stuhec
Stig Korsgaard

Discussion Topic 1: Context Methodology
Marion asks about a copy of Ken's message about Draft Guidelines for UBL Instance Creation. He suggests they have some specific questions that they would like some help on. Eduardo says it was Ken's way of figuring out how to do something without being informed about the Context Methodology. The paper is about extension. Ken summarizes other people's approaches to doing extensions, one of them is Sally's approach to extensions, Tim's thoughts as well as his own.

Eduardo suggests we give Ken our Context Methodology and attend a concall about it.
Jon wants to make sure we don't lose what they have been going through with Sally's examples and wanting to know if this is in or outside the guidelines we will give for context methodology manual extension. What LCSC want is a final version of this CM paper as applied to the real-life instances.

Eduardo proposes to be given time until Thurs evening to do another pass on the Guidelines and then send it to library for reading and see if it is satisfactory by Fri. He will look at Ken's paper and possibly Sally's examples. These are presented as instances not schemas which makes things a little more difficult.

Sally is using a purchase order instance without applying our purchase order schema. She is working under the assumption that she is UBL compliant, but I think there are questions about this. She is using a schema generated off of her own spreadsheets, it is the same UBL Perl script we use. This gives her a false impression that she is UBL compliant. This needs to be addressed fully.

Discussion Topic 2: Review XML instances
There are no sample instances right now that use the UBL schema. It would be more efficient to send out the revised CM paper.
Since this release there has been a turning point between the relationship between spreadsheet and schemas. We now have to maintain both the schema and the spreadsheet and they both have to be dealt with both of them at once. Hopefully, this can be done by changing the tool that is between them. We want Sally to roadtest the CM document (first we have to address the schema output and what schema she is using. If its not UBL schema, then its irrelevant.

NDR has two types of documentation. The first one is all of the information that we find in the spreadsheet. This would be included in the schema under a single documentation element as individual attributes. Level 2 is more detailed syntax specific implementation details, the usage of BIEs, links to UML diagrams. This would be for example for every type declaration we would give an XML instance example. In the schema we need the documentation of what we consider to be the normative description.

A documentation change would mean a version of the schema change. Our legal room is what we want to consider normative. A level of detail might not trigger a version update of the schema.

The release has all of the information within the spreadsheets, debate is: do we need more, and how much more. This goes back to this mornings discussion, how much information. One of our options is to include a lot more than in available in the spreadsheet now. This would mean all information about the structures would live within the schema. This is not a majority view. This is the extreme case of what we had been discussing. Some of this documentation could be references to outside documentation.

If we put it all into the schema and we say this is normative, we run into the same problem as always: if you make mistakes, you have to live with them. Would this text be normative?

Jons: Maybe we have a runtime version and an annotated schema, which would include this information. The annotated schema would not be normative. There is a limit to how much you can make normative.

Questions:
   How to maintain the documentation in the schema?
   How much documentation belongs in the schema, what are the choices here?
   How much of the text needs to be normative?

At this point the meeting was brought to a halt as we tried to get the teleconference going. The LCSC decided to try their call from the rooms.

Jon's proposal: We can not publish schema without comments, we don't want to publish a huge schema with everything as our schema. My suggestion is, what is in the spreadsheet is what goes into the schema.

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