Regrep 11 Feb conf call minutes

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

OASIS Regrep TC Conference Call
Friday 11 February 2000
Minutes

attending:

Nagwa Abdelghfour, Sun
Terry Allen, Commerce One
Lisa Carnahan, NIST
Una Kearns, Documentum
Norbert Mikula, DataChannel
Jeff Sutor, Sun
Yutaka Yoshida, Sun
Priscilla Walmsley, XMLSolutions

agenda:

 - discuss agenda, new items
 - XML.org update
 - EBXML update, including Orlando conference
 - XMI news if any
 - new items
 - adjourn

Terry described the current state of the XML.org SC (it
hasn't been officially established by the OASIS Board)
and the project for an initial implementation, which is
to be done by Sun and Documentum.  Within two weeks of the
XML.org meeting in Orlando documents are to be written to
establish what the initial implementation has to do; the
OASIS spec is to be revised in the light of implementation
experience to come so that the implementation matches
the spec when the implementation goes live.

Various persons discussed the EBXML meeting in Orlando.
UML turned out to be the design tool of choice for the Business
Process WG as well as the Regrep WG.  The EBXML
Regrep WG had a considerable turnover of membership from
the initial meeting, adding among other Nagwa and Yutaka.
The WG finished stating its business requirements, made
some progress on use cases, was visited by the Business
Proccess and Requirements groups, and had a teleconference
with Sridhar Iyengar of Unisys about XMI 1.1.

Terry described the results of his investigation into XMI 1.1
and its potential use to knit together the EBXML and OASIS
efforts.  He has been in correspondence with Iyengar and
Steven Brodsky (IBM) about it, and will post a report later;
in short, XMI DTDs generated from UML models (via the MOF)
are extremely loose and aren't useful outside an environment
that enforces the original UML model's constraints.  There is
no immediate need to solve this problem, but it needs to be
worked on before EBMXL expires in a year or so.

Norbert,joining later, related that the OASIS Board is working on 
getting the XML.org SC properly appointed.  Earlier, there was 
also some discussion of voting rules:  in our TC, voting is
by individuals; at the OASIS membership level, it's by member
organization; and the same is true (by contract) for the XML.org
SC.  Terry reminded of the 14 February deadline for volunteering
to be a voting member of the Regrep TC, and promised to send out
a list of those who had volunteered on 13 February (in case he's
lost track of a volunteer).

Una and Lisa asked various questions about implementation of the
specification (which shows we're really getting somewhere!), for
example, if the initial OASIS implementation really needs to use 
the zip submission package method and what sorts of things should
be retrievable.  Terry invited implementors to push back on the
spec and suggest alternatives; we are really wedded only to 
implementing ISO/IEC 11179; even the element names in the DTDs
could be changed if implementors have improvements to suggest.

Una also brought up the question of FPIs; it would seem that to
support SGML DTDs identified only by FPI it will be necessary
to provide URIs or them or make them available only through
an interface searchable by FPI or figure out something else.

Terry promised to send out again his revision of RFC 2483, which
specifies a format for requests by URL that we can use for getting
a registered object, its registration information, and its "related
data" (the 11179 term).  

Una requested a projector for the San Jose meeting.

Terry, noticing that several regulars couldn't make the call this
morning, agreed to ask the list if the day and hour are still okay.
Ad interim, we'll still plan the next call for two weeks later.

Adjourned.