CAP 1.1 dateTime fields

I have a comment and would like some clarification on the formatting of the dateTime fields, such as the sent field in the alert element which appears on page 11 of the 1 October 2005 document.

The example shows the date time formatted as 2002-05-24T16:48:00-07:00

The normative reference for the dateTime field (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime) states:

"[Definition:] dateTime values may be viewed as objects with integer-valued year, month, day, hour and minute properties, a decimal-valued second property, and a boolean timezoned property. ..."

Which clearly calls out he seconds value of the time field to be a decimal value. Later the spec calls out the format as designed by this regular expression

'-'? yyyy '-' mm '-' dd 'T' hh ':' mm ':' ss ('.' s+)? (zzzzzz)?

Which shows that the decimal part of the seconds field is optional. Making the example above a valid dateTime.

In interacting with other systems, I am finding that they reject times with the decimal defined. For instance I sent a CAP 1.1 alert with the sent time of:

2010-05-10T12:42:25.67525-07:00

Which includes the decimal information for the seconds field. It was rejected by the remote system as being non-compliant to the CAP specification. Is it the intent to allow remote systems to redefine or override the normative dataTypes in this way, or am I misinterpreting the specification?

Incidentally, this came up because of an interoperability issue between a .net system and an Oracle 10g system. .Net emits its dateTime compliant to the xml specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime) with the decimal points, but the parser on the other end seems to reject them as invalid.

Patrick Lupiani, CISSP

Senior Software Engineer

Buffalo Computer Graphics

Phone: (716) 822-8668 x124

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