Re: [egov] XML Schema Design and Management Guide for Hong Kong SAR Government

[David RR Webber - XML ebusiness <Gnosis_@compuserve.com>]

Joe / Thomas,

I just reviewed same.   While the work is extensive - I would
caution that part of the methods detailed are based on the
premise that if you create a W3C Schema XSD definition
that you have created information interoperability.

Particularly the step of converting the business data
analysis into schema code is an issue.

Unfortunately schema is not designed to be able to
do business context driven assembly and to capture
the breadth of rules needed.  Associative content
models are not supported, nor is code values and
versioning, to mention just some.

In the limited case if two government departments
are using a small mandatory schema definition for
a constant piece of information exchange - then in
this subset - its OK.  However then the method
documented becomes a sledgehammer to 
crack a nut.    If you are doing government wide
exchanges of multi-faceted information - you simply
will not be able to manage that level of needs
as described in the method documented.

As I mentioned earlier - this is what OASIS CAM 
will solve for you - being able to do context 
driven assembly and in-depth support for 
metadata and registries via the UID mechanism.
Add this this webservice and BPM integration too.

By way of example - consider addresses.  I would
hazard a guess that the HK gov needs to send
mail to Singapore, Japan, Korea, China (ML) and
Korea.  How would you build a context driven 
structure definition to solve this, based on country
and delivery method and address type (yes there
are typically five address types per country)?

How can you also do lookups from a schema
parser to check that the postcode is not only 
the right pattern - but that the postcode is 
actually valid for that country?

The OASIS CAM team is solving this right now
building templates that match the UPU addressing
rules.   The template will then allow a pluggable
sub-assembly into an XML structure that will 
provide mapping to local address formats 
as a truely re-usable definition set - context driven.

That's just one example.

Thanks, DW.
Chair OASIS CAM TC.
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Message text written by "Chiusano Joseph"
> 
I reviewed these documents and I am highly impressed with their depth,
clarity, and accuracy.

Kind Regards,
Joe Chiusano
<