XPath files for CS UBL 2.0 are now available

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

Good morning, all,

With many thanks to Mary and Robin at OASIS for 
their efforts in getting this file posted for me 
in time for today, I'm pleased to announce one 
can now find the latest XPath files for the UBL 
2.0 Committee Specification at this location:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/submissions/XPath-files/XPath-files-readme.html

The current ZIP file itself is 300Mb, expanding to 8Gb when unzipped:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/submissions/XPath-files/UBL-2.0-20061006-XPath.zip

These XPath files will form part of the UBL 2.0 
support package, but they are already useful in 
their own right so I've been anxious to have them 
posted so they can be officially cited and 
utilized by one of the projects to which I am 
contributing.  I suspect other projects should find these files very useful.

Developed originally to specify the constructs in 
the Small Business Subset, XPath files have now 
turned out to be very useful in the development 
of and the quality assurance checking of a UBL 
customization.  I have plans to experiment with 
these files in a deployment of my own to 
establish their applicability and usefulness, 
which may form some guidelines for new users 
creating a deployment of UBL.  You can see some 
of my earlier thoughts on this in the previously 
announced discussion document of mine at the 
following address, though some of the details have already changed:

   http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=18849

An XPath file enumerates all of the information 
items (elements and attributes), in all contexts, 
for a document model.  It does so independent of 
whatever technology is used to specify the 
constraints on the document model.  It is just an 
exhaustive enumeration (which is why an XPath file can be so very large).

Some of the modeling decisions in UBL 2 resulted 
in deep reuse, something not as evident in UBL 1 
or even PRD2 of UBL 2.  Because of these document 
modeling decisions I've had to do much of my work 
with these large XPath files using the SAX 
interface to XML rather than XSLT since some XSLT 
processors have difficulty (in both size and speed) with a 475Mb XML instance.

In the last few weeks I've used these files in 
the definition of a UBL customization, paring 
down the list of information items to meet my 
customer's requirements.  Interestingly, my 
customer has contextual constraints such that the 
same element information item has different 
content definitions in different contexts.  This 
can be accommodated in an XPath file.

The document model constraints for XPath files 
themselves have been revised to allow the 
presence of foreign vocabularies.  As part of my 
work in paring down the files, I ended up 
decorating the files with custom annotations 
created by my customer just by putting these in a 
separate namespace.  The included RELAX-NG model 
for XPath files accommodates the presence of 
foreign vocabulary constructs.  I haven't yet 
modified the W3C Schema model of XPath files 
since it is only an approximation of some of the 
other constraints of the XPath document model.

As I get results from my deployment 
experimentation, I will post more about the use 
of XPath files, but for now they are available 
for anyone to use, and are now part of the 
permanent record so that my customer can cite them on the OASIS server.

I look forward to answering any questions anyone 
may have about these files and their use, as this 
will help us in shaping the support package.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken

--
UBL/XSLT/XSL-FO training: Allerød/Vårø Denmark 2006-11-13,17,20/24
UBL International 2006  2006-11-13/17 http://www.ublconference.com
World-wide corporate, govt. & user group UBL, XSL, & XML training.
G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/o/
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