[ubl-ttsc] Status of Tools Committee

["Gregory, Arofan" <arofan.gregory@commerceone.com>]

Title: [ubl-ttsc] Status of Tools Committee

Folks:

You will have noticed that there has been no activity in this group to date. In part, this is the result of dependencies on other parts of the UBL group, most notably the Design Subcommittee and the Library Subcommittee.

Work in those groups has produced not only the basic requirements tools must meet, but also some actual running code (many thanks, Gunther!)

First:

- The Library Subcommittee has defined a spreadsheet format giving all of the properties of the components they are designing, which includes the information needed to model XSD, some documentation, and some additional metadata. This is the interim working format with an intention to use XSD schema as the modelling language for the canonical version.

- The Design subcommittee is addresing points about how namespaces and extensions will be used, and we should have some hard requirements early in the new year for what tools must support.

- Gunther has done a good deal of work here, and come up with the following items:
        * A conventional format for including all of the properties of the spreadsheet (that is, the library subcommittee's work to date) in an XSDL form, based on the use of        the documentation fields, rather than App Info.

        * A perl script that will turn the spreadsheets into this form of XSD
        * He is  working on another perl script to render the XSD models as spreadsheets
Because he has done this in XML Spy, he can output a fairly useful image-intensive form of HTML describing the library for those who are less comfortable reading the raw schemas. The down-sie of this output is that it can only be created by XML Spy, and that we cannot change the output, which is lacking in some ways.

Gunther said he would send out all of the above next week, before going on his mid-winter holidays. I suggest that the members of this group review what Gunther has done, so that we can either adopt or approve what he's got here.

This gives us a good starting point for looking at the tools that will be needed. I would suggest that we need a few additions:

* A recommended  XML editor that will run on non-Windows systems, and not require a license key   (really, people can use whatever editor they please, but we should recommend something that we know can get the job done)

* A recommended *free* Windows-based XML editor

* A stylesheet for transforming the XSD instances into form of HTML that is both controllable by us (that is, we can fix the output) and that is not so intensively based on images.

* A mechanism for rendering our XSD models - with all relevant metadata currently contained in documentation fields - in a UML form acceptable to those who prefer that sort of thing. I'd like to ask Dave Carlson what he's got in this department, based on his earlier UML work.

Second:

I would like to propose that the work of this group initially be conducted over e-mail, given the interruptions posed by the holidays. If people could review what Gunther has done, and respond to it, that will be a good first step. A conference call metting will be held early in the new year.

Cheers,

Arofan Gregory