[ubl-lcsc] At the upcoming face to face we have a scheduled agenda item

[Tim McGrath <tmcgrath@portcomm.com.au>]

At the upcoming face to face we have a scheduled agenda item  for 
discussing the ideas of containership based on normalization.

To demonstrate what this means to our modeling, i have taken the current 
'Party' structure and applied to principles given in the Containership 
position paper.

Please find attached a PDF file describing the structures, before and 
after normalization. [NB in the process of this I made some analysis and 
design decisions - this was not just a mechanical process.  the exercise 
did, i feel, expose some wekanesses and help design some better solutions]

To show this is not just theory, i created an hierarchical tree view 
based on the context of Party as applied to an Order.  The becomes the 
schema structure. To show this i am also including an XSD for this 
structure - but it is not the UBL implementation of XSD, just a basic 
 and crude version to show the principle involved.(it also comes with a 
diagram courtesy of XML Spy).

To prepare for our discussion i encourage you all to consider this 
material carefully.  If anyone wants to try their own exercise feel free 
to do so.  There are several implications for our future work in this. 
 One of which is the use of the current spreadsheet for our logical 
model - how can we show the structures such as in the PDF file using 
this form?  Is there a better tool?  
Another consideration would be, how does this concept fit with the idea 
of 'context' (e.g. look at the way 'contact' is now a repeated set)?  Is 
'context' somehow related to the links/relationships between containers?  
With respect to the CCTS naming rules, can we say that these ABIEs are 
the 'Object Classes' and their BIE components are 'properties' of their 
'Object Class' ?  If so, can the links/relationships be the property 
qualifiers?  For example, the ABIE 'Party' has (potentially) multiple 
properties of 'Contact'.  What differentiates them is the relationship 
(or context), such as Receiving Contact, Shipping Contact.  That makes 
the Object class = Order, the property = Contact and the property 
qualifier = Shipping, giving us Order.Shipping Contact etc...

I hope this is a useful primer and i look forward to the forthcoming 
discussions.

-- 
regards
tim mcgrath
fremantle  western australia 6160
phone: +618 93352228  fax: +618 93352142

Attachment: Partynormalized.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

Attachment: normalizedparty1.xsd
Description: text/xml