Re: [codelist] Proposed Conformance Clause for genericode 1.0 specification

["Anthony B. Coates (Miley Watts)" <abcoates@mileywatts.com>]

My apologies, I've been travelling, and I am woefully behind in keeping up  
with e-mail.

On Sat, 21 Jul 2007 20:59:16 +0100, G. Ken Holman  
<gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com> wrote:

> Conformance
>
>     An XML instance is considered to be conforming to the
>     OASIS code list representation genericode document model
>     if it does not violate any constraints expressed in the
>     genericode.xsd and xml.xsd schema expressions associated
>     with this version of the specification.

Conformant genericode code lists also need to satisfy the extra rules that  
the Schema *can't* check.  It comes back to what I wrote a while back,  
that the normative parts of the specification together *are* the  
definition of the conformance criteria, more or less.  We certainly need  
to capture that adherence to the Schemas alone isn't sufficient.

What are these extra rules?  Well, for example, each row has to have a  
sensible set of values.  It has to have one and only one value for each  
required column, and may have at most a single value for an optional  
column.  In matching values to columns, you have to take account of the  
rule for how you implicitly match values to columns when the column isn't  
explicitly specified.

Also, references to external column sets and code lists have to be valid,  
i.e. the columns that you refer to in an external file must exist in that  
file.  In addition, the actual values should conform to the datatype for  
the matching column.  I'm sure these aren't all of the extra rules, I'm  
just writing down the ones that come to mind.

By the way, I'm happy to change the name of the Schema to  
'genericode.xsd'.  Was that a decision, or a suggestion, from previous  
telecons?  Apologies I missed the last two, by the way.

Cheers, Tony.
-- 
Anthony B. Coates
Senior Partner
Miley Watts LLP
Experts In Data
UK: +44 (20) 8816 7700, US: +1 (239) 344 7700
Mobile/Cell: +44 (79) 0543 9026
Data standards participant: genericode, ISO 20022 (ISO 15022 XML),  
UN/CEFACT, MDDL, FpML, UBL.
http://www.mileywatts.com/