RE: Fw: [election-services] Voting Information Project

OK - that confirms my view - that whoever created this VIP XML did take a look at EML and use our vocabulary at least. I also was thinking - hmmmm - I could create some XSLT to morph this into EML...

Here's the rub though - not just EML - but every OASIS effort is XSD bound today. That means that folks like VIP hit this same issue - that the XSD is too gnarly to get your head around.

Fortunately we do have a standard answer. At the risk of sounding like a broken record...

Check out what I just did for the CIQ V3 person information (BTW - John - you did add this to the EML V6 "wishes" list right?!). IMHO CIQ V3 is so so much better than V2 its painful to even look at V2 anymore.

So - with this kind of documention (built automatically BTW) - and tooling to allow people to quickly and easily build their own wantlist XSD and subset - we can reach out to folks much more easily. They can also provide ancillary rules and templates using CAM that are not possible with the XSD alone.

Right now the EML is butt ugly when you open up it, not least because of all the CIQ V2 stuff - its just gets in the way.

Help though is at hand - we can document this with just a subset of the CIQ V2 stuff included - so its much much easier for folks to "see" the EML parts - and get to grips with using that. And we can create whole sets of examples to reference.

The tools for this are in the jCAM editor current download.

The rub is Martin has not integrated my very latest XSLT into the jCAM eclipse editor yet - hopefully that will be available on Monday in the sourceforge download - I'll let you know as soon as.

Then we can set about producing these for EML V5 - and a quick screen podcast to show people how to easily and quickly to do the wantlist generation themselves.

Adoption and implementation is a big issue for any of these large XSDs - not just EML.

Hopefully with all this in hand we can go back to the VIP folks and show them how to use EML "as is" in a simple and direct way - to do what they need - without having to create their own "subset" that's not exactly equivalent.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Fw: [election-services] Voting Information Project
From: "Joseph Lorenzo Hall" <joehall@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 29, 2008 8:55 pm
To: richcar@us.ibm.com
Cc: election-services@lists.oasis-open.org

Hmm, that mention of EML must be new, because I didn't see it earlier
in the week. best, Joe

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 3:52 PM, <richcar@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> Making contact with the VIP people sounds like the right thing to do. On the technical side, the VIP 1.2 schema does not take advantage of various XML capabilities, like the ability to enforce uniqueness of ids or to enforce cardinality constraints on some elements.
>
> I noticed the following entry on the VIP FAQ page, the logic of which I don't quite understand:
>
> 5) What about the Election Markup Language (EML)? Why aren't you using that?
>
> The Election Markup Language (EML) is a data standard that covers most of what the VIP's format covers and more. While it's very flexible, and is global, it has seen little adoption in the United States. To spur state election officials to publish their data in a common format, we designed a more focused format that is easier for states and U.S. organizations to adopt. During this process, we looked to the EML for inspiration and we plan on exporting VIP data into EML in the near future.

--
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
UC Berkeley School of Information
http://josephhall.org/

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