Re: [ubl-dev] Simple description of XML-Spreadsheet format

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

At 2008-09-19 03:37 +0800, Chin Chee-Kai wrote:
>G. Ken Holman wrote:
>>Chee-Kai, you may consider publishing these UBL v1.0 IDD 
>>spreadsheets as genericode files so that you are using a standard 
>>representation:
>>
>>   http://docs.oasis-open.org/codelist/genericode/
>>
>>UBL v2.0 IDD spreadsheets are available in XML format using 
>>genericode ... the latest version I published was in July 2007:
>>
>>http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/resources/ubl/index.htm#ubl2idd2genericode
>Thanks for highlighting this, Ken.  Much delighted to see 
>genericoding of the spreadsheet values for UBL v2.0.  It's certainly 
>good to be using the genericode standard for coded values.
>...
>The advantage of genericode to store model spreadsheets 
>(CommonLibrary and main documents), the way I see it, is that it 
>contains processed linkages of related and essential values, so that 
>perhaps lesser processing needs  to take place during use.  In terms 
>of "faithfulness" to original spreadsheet, for instance, I'm not 
>exactly sure how to reduce spreadsheet's "Dictionary Entry Name" 
>into "den", "Cardinality" into "card", why is "type" a <SimpleValue> 
>whereas a "terms" is a <ComplexValue> and so on.  That hidden 
>conversion table and knowledge imply  a knowledgeable converter (a 
>utility software or human) that stores such a "mapping".

Have you (or anyone else on UBL-Dev) considered since this earlier 
discussion how best to mechanically reduce IDD column names to 
genericode column names?  Later today I hope to release the PRD01 
version of the 2.0 Update IDD and am willing to change the column 
names accordingly.

For the time being I'm going to change the old abbreviations to full 
space-removed names extracted from the IDD spreadsheets themselves, 
taking your point about unexpected abbreviation derivations.

>(BTW, I think attribute names should, heeding good practice from UBL 
>NDR, be lowerCamelCased.  So attributes such as  "ColumnRef", "Id", 
>and "Use" should be lowerCamelCased.  Just a thought)

That is hard-wired in genericode and outside the purview of UBL or 
UBL's NDR.  It was preserved from the genericode submission to 
OASIS.  Another interesting aspect of the genericode specification 
I've never seen in any other vocabulary:  the document element name 
is in the genericode namespace while every other element name in the 
model is in no namespace.  An interesting approach that is gaining 
some favour in my eyes, though I'm as yet unwilling to follow the 
practice in my own designed XML vocabularies.

>I would offer to work out the UBL v2.0 IDD draft if you could share 
>the draft spreadsheet online somewhere.

These are the spreadsheets I'm using as the basis for my release this 
afternoon:

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl/200810/msg00020.html

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken


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