RE: [ubl] UBL master data for maintenance

["Ken Sall" <oasis@kensall.com>]

Quite frankly, I'm very surprised and confused by this thread and the one
beginning at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl/200502/msg00039.html.

As a user of UBL 1.0, when I read the official documentation, I came away
with the distinct impression that EDIFIX was clearly the tool of choice for
UBL. Refer to these quotes (not in order) from
http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cd-UBL-1.0/ 

"A commercial CC-aware schema generation tool, GEFEG EDIFIXR 5.0, was used
to read the spreadsheets as UML data models, perform Q/A with them, and
produce a schema representation adhering to the UBL 1.0 Naming and Design
Rules, as illustrated below...."

"The UBL XML Naming and Design Rules (NDR) checklist included in this
package describes the rules used to determine UBL 1.0 XSD schema structures
and element/attribute names...."

"The UBL XSD schemas are implementations of the document assembly models
defined by UBL. They are the only normative representation of the UBL 1.0
document types and library components...."

"These advantages [of spreadsheets] were felt to outweigh the main
disadvantage of spreadsheet notation, which is the lack of referential
integrity controls in the modeling language itself; manual editing is
required to control the impact of changes. In this case, fortunately, the
commercial tool used to generate the final schemas from the spreadsheets was
also capable of verifying model integrity.

"The UBL ASN.1 specification defines the same UBL documents as the UBL XSD
schemas in Section 6 that constitute the normative definitions of valid UBL
documents...."

I took this to mean that the *only* normative version of the model was XML
Schema, rather than the spreadsheets. Since the schemas were produced by
EDIFIX, then EDIFIX was something I'd better consider getting.

I cannot find a reference that says the spreadsheets are normative and it's
my understanding that the EDIFIX Q/A process actually uncovered numerous
bugs in the spreadsheets. (I have seen this first hand with my own
spreadsheets and EDIFIX.)

Mark C,

Is is true as you indicated in your Nov. 2004 CCTS/NDR training class that
LMI is working on its own CCTS/NDR software? What is the name of that
software and when will it be demonstrated to the UBL TC? How does it (or
will it) handle the versioning issue mentioned in the other thread?

-Ken Sall


-----Original Message-----
From: Grimley Michael J NPRI [mailto:GrimleyMJ@Npt.NUWC.Navy.Mil] 
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 12:50 PM
To: ubl@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [ubl] UBL master data for maintenance


I would also like to remind members of one of the UBL Guiding Principles:

    "Tool Use and Support - The design of UBL will not make any assumptions
about sophisticated tools for creation, management, storage, or presentation
being available. The lowest common denominator for tools is incredibly low
(for example, Notepad) and the variety of tools used is staggering. We do
not see this situation changing in the near term."

Thank You,
MikeG

-----Original Message-----
From: jon.bosak@sun.com [mailto:jon.bosak@sun.com] 
Sent: Friday, 25 February 2005 12 20
To: ubl@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [ubl] UBL master data for maintenance

[dill2@gefeg.com:]

|   After reading the UBL call minutes, I understand that the current 
| decision is to view spreadsheets as the maintenance master data of 
| UBL. This means necessarily that UBL plans to produce further errors 
| in the future too. I would like to ask for which reasons the earlier 
| decision to use Edifix as the master has been overturned?

There was never a decision to use EF as the master.  On the contrary, the
decision was explicitly to use the spreadsheets as the master, and it was
upon the basis of this understanding, and the agreement by GEFEG to provide
for both import and export of the spreadsheets, that the TC agreed to use EF
for the UBL 1.1 build cycle.

Jon


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