RE: [emergency] Naming Conventions

A somewhat tangential subject will be appropriateness for the medium.

I reviewed the JusticeXML Data Dictionary and Schema yesterday. It

is a stunningly complete work for public safety records management

systems, but will be unworkable for bandwidth-constrained environments

such as RF-enabled field units. Some thought will have to be given

to the practicality of these names given the medium in which they are

used. Verboseness does matter. XSLT adds overhead but will be the

preferred solution in some cases, even, closed systems (same

vendor for CAD, RMS and AFR). While this is not technically

difficult, the language used in the specifications as reflected in the

RFPs must account for medium-appropriateness.

intergraph public safety

What follows is an excerpt from a paper I'm building for a subcommittee I chair which is directly related to our discussion on naming conventions and the issues presented by John Silva's presentation on ISO/IEC 11179. As you will gather, the paper represents the convergence of issues across several standards and standards groups, but I am only including the part that is relevant to the discussion we had this week.

Note: this is an ongoing research project which is developing much of a life of its own than I intended, but that happens. FWIW it has led me down the path of exploring the DOM and more study of RDF and Ontologies in general.

As you may know, there is no magic wand for unifying naming conventions, and as difficult as it is, I have found that the combination of namespacing for standards which have produced an xml schema, using the namespace prefix, and a verbose naming convention within the standards themselves, such as the one I suspect we will produce, is the most workable if not the only workable method to use to conform to what standards have emerged and are emerging.

The Human Physical Characteristics Description Markup Language (HPCDML) and the subcommittee of the OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee dedicated to producing this xml-based language, is aimed at bringing together a comprehensive synthesis of existing and planned standards for documenting the Human Body. <snip>

When I say that I am beginning work, that is only partly true because I have done quite extensive research work in the course of my participation in the HumanML TC, the Web Services for Interactive Applications and Remote Portals TCs and the newly minted Emergency Management TC, and that work has led me to a conclusion that ties all of these seemingly disparate efforts together and includes other efforts, such as those of the Web 3D Consortium (X3D, H-Anim and GeoVRML) as well. The conclusion is that there is actually little original work that needs to be done, but there is a great deal of study, comparison and compilation that does need to be done. I suspect that a DAML-OIL-based application-specific RDF Schema/Ontology will probably emerge from this work and the Human Physical Characteristics Description ML will probably emerge from that work, as a Secondary Schema of the Human Markup Language.

A sample of what I mean is embodied in the prerelease Justice Department Data Dictionary recently made available, ( (which will be) included in the list below), which overlaps HumanML and Emergency Management. That document in pdf form is 7.8M.

Similarly, among the five standards now mandatory for all federal agencies for coding and sharing medical records, (according to the article cited here: http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/21493-1.html), the Health Level 7 Reference Information Model xml text file is 6.6M.

Both of these standards, and many more will need to be compared and best practices recommended for their use within the HPCDML. These are not insignificant, and they point up the need to develop a way to integrate these resources and navigate to the specific datatypes which are appropriate to the application uses one requires. A partial list of groups, their urls, associated specifications and brief descriptions or self-descriptions where possible within reasonable length limitations follows. Each entry is followed by an empty line space.

This list is neither comprehensive nor exhuastive, but reflects the current state of my personal knowledge as best I can assemble it in mid-April 2003. Since clear and correct, or correctly namespaced, Names for individuals and terms are of paramount concern, I list the standards for this area first, beginning with Extensible Name Service first because it is, along with ISO 11179, which defines the specification and standardization of data elements, a key resource and set of requirements for Names, Naming Conventions, associated datamodels and datatypes and Naming-Related Information.

NAMING AND DATA STANDARDS, CONVENTIONS AND RESOURCES

XNSORG: XNS Public Trust Organization
http://www.xns.org/
http://www.xns.org/pages/specs.html
XNS Technical Specification v1.0 (PDF) - The official specification document for Extensible Name Service, version 1.0. Includes the XNS Service Specification, normative XML Schema (XSD) and Web Services Description (WSDL) files for all services, and the XNS Addressing Specification including normative EBNF syntax, plus an extensive glossary and other suppporting materials.

Joint Technical Committee 1: International Standards Organization(ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission Technical Committee for Information Technology Standards (Of particular interest is ISO/IEC 11179, which can be downloaded below, or accessed at the url which follows the description of the overall JTC)
http://www.jtc1.org
For Published Standards: http://www.jtc1.org/Navigation.asp?Mode=Browse&Area=Glance&SubComm=ISO%2FIECJTC1&CommLevel=TC&OldSubComm=ISO%2FIEC+JTC+1&SCCODE=
JTC 1 Scope
Standardization in the field of Information Technology.
Note: Information Technology includes the specification, design and development of systems and tools dealing with the capture, representation, processing, security, transfer, interchange, presentation, management, organization, storage and retrieval of information.
For ISO/IEC 11179: http://www.diffuse.org/meta.html#ISO11179

MARC21: http://www.loc.gov/marc/marcginf.html
Paper on Naming Conventions: http://www.loc.gov/marc/naming.html
MARC is the acronym for MAchine-Readable Cataloging
It defines a data format which emerged from a Library of Congress led initiative begun thirty years ago (in the 1970s). MARC became USMARC in the 1980s and MARC 21 in the late 1990s. It provides the mechanism by which computers exchange, use and interpret bibliographic information and its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogs used today.

The Network Development and MARC Standards Office is a center for library and information network standards and planning in the Library of Congress. Established in 1976 to provide focus for networking activities in the Library of Congress, the office was expanded in 1984 to include MARC standards responsibilities. To contact it, please e-mail: ndmso@loc.gov

Rex Brooks
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA, 94702 USA, Earth
W3Address: http://www.starbourne.com
Email: rexb@starbourne.com

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