-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [emergency] EDXL HAVE and NIEM 2.1 dictionary alignment?
From: "Lee Tincher" <ltincher@evotecinc.com>
Date: Tue, July 14, 2009 5:19 pm
To: "'David RR Webber (XML)'" <david@drrw.info>, "'Gary Ham'"
<hamgva@cox.net>
Cc: <emergency@lists.oasis-open.org>, "'Timothy Grapes'"
<tgrapes@evotecinc.com>
Actually – Gary is supporting the stance I have been trying to get across – we do not need a wantlist – We created a HAVE adapter and submitted it to NIEM. That approach supports federation of namespaces…re-creating HAVE from a wantlist does not, it promotes integration, which will not work as the standards would not be able to exchange between each other….
Thanks,
Lee
"I was wondering why that Frisbee was getting bigger - then it hit me."
From: David RR Webber (XML) [mailto:david@drrw.info]
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 4:53 PM
To: Gary Ham
Cc: emergency@lists.oasis-open.org; 'Lee Tincher'; 'Timothy Grapes'
Subject: RE: [emergency] EDXL HAVE and NIEM 2.1 dictionary alignment?
Attached is a revised wantlist.xml for EDXL HAVE / NIEM
I found on closer inspection that there were things the earlier iteration from the weekend missed.
Plus I've attached a copy of the EDXL-dictionary.xml - for all domains used.
You can drag and drop that into Excel and it opens as a spreadsheet - and then filter on namespace add desired.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [emergency] EDXL HAVE and NIEM 2.1 dictionary alignment?
From: "Gary Ham" <hamgva@cox.net>
Date: Tue, July 14, 2009 4:19 pm
To: "'David RR Webber (XML)'" <david@drrw.info>, "'Timothy Grapes'"
<tgrapes@evotecinc.com>
Cc: <emergency@lists.oasis-open.org>, "'Lee Tincher'"
<ltincher@evotecinc.com>
This thread happened to coincide with a rather detailed study of NIEM that I have been doing recently. In fact, I just posted to my blog http://grandpaham.com a comment on what I like most about NIEM and a warning not to force like concepts from differing contexts into the same structure. I am going to repeat the blog post here (although if I wanted to drive traffic I would make you go to my site):
I have been studying the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) fairly extensively over the last few weeks. I have even read the NIEM Naming and Design Rules document from beginning to end. I will admit that I went into it with something of a jaundiced view. As a veteran contributor to the DoD data model and an outside observer of the GJXDM (recently), and a large scale IBM model (a long time ago), I have real reservations about the usability and maintainability of any all-knowing, all-seeing model. I have, at least at this point, become a believer in NIEM. Why? Because NIEM accepts the notion that a federation between separately name-spaced models makes sense, both within NIEM, and with external standards defined outside the heavy NIEM NDR discipline (or defined with a different heavy discipline). The notion of defining an Adapter for NIEM use of other standards is a brilliant concept. This, combined with the Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD) methodology for documenting the contextual use of data used in exchanges has made me a fan. The problem with this “federation of standards” concept is that it makes tools (and “auto-magic” validation) harder to build. As a result there is a tendency to try and force all of the standards back into the all-knowing, all-seeing model. It is a seductive idea, but not a good idea. Let’s look at a very simple example: EDXL Resource Management uses the Customer Information Quality (CIQ standard) for Person Names. This allows internationalization for all kinds of different Naming structures and for a wide variety of Addressing schemes. NIEM (as a national model) is much more U.S. centric, particularly in the use of PersonName tag. Both CIQ and NIEM are appropriate in their respective namespaces (and the NIEM NDR respects this fact by allowing for the adapter wrapper for external standards). If we try to combine the two standards by defining CIQ elements as NIEM elements directly in order to make the subschema generator work more easily, we blur important distinctions that were developed for good reason.
So, we need to use NIEM IEPD methods. They are excellent. But we must resist the desire to force single definitions for concepts that may appear to be the same, but actually differ due to the context in which they were defined. In other words, do not force a merger of conceptual domains, unless they actually are the same. NIEM lets us federate in the building of an IEPD. We should take advantage of that capability.