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ISO/IEC 11179 posits the use of an International Registration Data Identifier (IRDI), specified in ISO/IEC 6523, and bureaucratic infrastructure to support assignment of various components of it. This infrastructure seems not to exist, and the OASIS Registry and Repository Technical Committee will not specify its use, it appears than other identifiers, notably URNs, will serve the same purpose. Note that SOs must be required to use URNs or other identifiers only from name spaces they are authorized to use; pointers to entities registered but not deposited should resolve to a site the SO is authorized to use. (For the purpose of unique identification any globally unique ID will works, such as the Microsoft GUID, but for ease of implementation it would be best if such IDs were presented as URNs.) URN resolver preferences may be expressed in the URN Resolver Preferences DTD, for which urnsamp.txt is a sample instance.
One of the uses of the IRDI is that the RA assigns one to an application for registration of a data element; in the same process the Registration Status of the entity to be registered is established by the RA. It is clear that the registry requires metadata beyond that supplied by the SO.
ISO/IEC 11179 is the obvious choice for registry metadata. The existing standard is specified in English, so it lacks a concrete syntax. The proposed revision of its Part 3, ANSI X3.285, Metamodel for the Management of Shareable Data is specified in English and accompanied by UML diagrams. The ISO/IEC 11179 working group is exploring the possibility of generating an XMI representation of the metamodel automatically from the UML. (The ISO/IEC JTC1 / SC 32 / WG 2 proposal for a work item on XML for ISO/IEC 11179 is .) The OASIS Registry and Repository Technical Committee has decided not to use this approach, at least for the present, for the following reasons.
XMI has a very weak DTD, and is suitable only as a transfer syntax among UML tools. Many semantics important within a UML model are not tokenized by generation of an XMI representation (no markup for describing them results from generating the XMI).
The metamodel's object-oriented design is very much easier to express in an XML schema language that supports inheritance than in DTD syntax, but no XML schema language is ready for use by OASIS).
It is not clear that the full complexity of X3.285 is useful for the OASIS-sponsored registry, it is thought that those not actually involved in its development may find it difficult to learn and use, and it is suspected that perhaps it may not yet have been thought out as thoroughly as it should be, on the ground that its developers disagree about some aspects of its use.
X3.285 is still undergoing revision and is not entirely stable.
Consequently the registry, which does not require the complexity of X3.285, will use the existing standard rather than the metamodel and await developments from SC32 WG2.
The OASIS Registry and Repository Technical Committee should track revision of ISO/IEC 11179 and the outcome of the W3C's XML Schema activity so that the registration document type may be updated when and as appropriate.
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