RE: [ubl] UBL master data for maintenance

[Grimley Michael J NPRI <GrimleyMJ@Npt.NUWC.Navy.Mil>]

Ken,

"As a user of UBL 1.0, when I read the official documentation, I came away with the distinct impression that EDIFIX was clearly the tool of choice for UBL."

There is a world of difference between *choosing* to use a tool and *requiring* the use of a tool.

Thank You,
MikeG

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Sall [mailto:oasis@kensall.com] 
Sent: Friday, 25 February 2005 13 16
To: 'Grimley Michael J NPRI'; ubl@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [ubl] UBL master data for maintenance

Quite frankly, I'm very surprised and confused by this thread and the one beginning at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl/200502/msg00039.html.

As a user of UBL 1.0, when I read the official documentation, I came away with the distinct impression that EDIFIX was clearly the tool of choice for UBL. Refer to these quotes (not in order) from http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cd-UBL-1.0/ 

"A commercial CC-aware schema generation tool, GEFEG EDIFIXR 5.0, was used to read the spreadsheets as UML data models, perform Q/A with them, and produce a schema representation adhering to the UBL 1.0 Naming and Design Rules, as illustrated below...."

"The UBL XML Naming and Design Rules (NDR) checklist included in this package describes the rules used to determine UBL 1.0 XSD schema structures and element/attribute names...."

"The UBL XSD schemas are implementations of the document assembly models defined by UBL. They are the only normative representation of the UBL 1.0 document types and library components...."

"These advantages [of spreadsheets] were felt to outweigh the main disadvantage of spreadsheet notation, which is the lack of referential integrity controls in the modeling language itself; manual editing is required to control the impact of changes. In this case, fortunately, the commercial tool used to generate the final schemas from the spreadsheets was also capable of verifying model integrity.

"The UBL ASN.1 specification defines the same UBL documents as the UBL XSD schemas in Section 6 that constitute the normative definitions of valid UBL documents...."

I took this to mean that the *only* normative version of the model was XML Schema, rather than the spreadsheets. Since the schemas were produced by EDIFIX, then EDIFIX was something I'd better consider getting.

I cannot find a reference that says the spreadsheets are normative and it's my understanding that the EDIFIX Q/A process actually uncovered numerous bugs in the spreadsheets. (I have seen this first hand with my own spreadsheets and EDIFIX.)

Mark C,

Is is true as you indicated in your Nov. 2004 CCTS/NDR training class that LMI is working on its own CCTS/NDR software? What is the name of that software and when will it be demonstrated to the UBL TC? How does it (or will it) handle the versioning issue mentioned in the other thread?

-Ken Sall