RE: [ubl] Proposed withdrawal of my NDR suggestions for ABIE extensibility

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

At 2006-06-22 04:48 +0000, juerg.tschumperlin@minedu.govt.nz wrote:
> >(2) - any new minor versions add only
> >optional
> >constructs and don't change any existing >optional constructs to mandatory
>
>Does that mean minor versions must include or redefine

I am unable to decipher W3C Schema sufficiently 
well to determine if any of its constructs can be used directly.

I'm anticipating the committee will "push the 
button" and emit a new set of schemas from 
modified document models such that we get brand 
new complete expressions of UBL 2.x at any time, 
with no reliance on syntactic inclusion mechanisms.

>the immediately preceeding version? (import is 
>not possible if the namespace URI is the same).
>
>I noticed that REDEFINE does not work for

I cannot get W3C Schema redefine to work for me 
for any of my production tasks.  Where possible I 
try to use RELAX-NG and copious amounts of 
replaceable patterns to achieve the flexibility 
needed for redefinition of constructs.

>library modules: For examle, a CBC2.1 that 
>redefines CBC 2.0 is fine, but only until a 
>CAC2.1 is importing the CBC2.1. CAC2.1 does then 
>no longer validate because of the duplicates 
>that exists due to the duplicate paths (and 
>items) to CBC2.0, one via CAC2.0 to CBC2.0, the other via CBC2.1 to CBC2.0.
>
>Therefore, is my conclusion correct that for 
>library module minor versions only INCLUDE will 
>work? (Unless I make a full copy of the 
>preceeding version - which is probably not desirable)

Actually, I believe that works quite well for the 
committee because of the collaborative 
development environment in which we work ... in 
that the committee determines the constructs of 
the document model using the spreadsheets then 
the actual document models themselves are emitted 
from the abstraction agreed upon by members.

>On the document schemas however, the INCLUDE 
>does not seem to make much sense, because I 
>cannot modify any items of the preceeding 
>version, nor can I define a like-named item. 
>Here only the REDEFINE seems possible for 
>modifying the necessary ABIE(s). Unless once 
>again, I make a (undesirable) full copy of the document schema.
>
>Are my assumptions correct and realistic?

I can confirm I am personally unable to divine 
how W3C Schema inclusion mechanisms work to meet 
our requirements, and I agree with your 
observations that to get what we need we need a 
new full copy of the schema .... but I do not agree this is undesirable.

Syntactic means for expressing incremental 
changes to document models are conveniences to 
prevent the *need* to re-express the entire 
document model (and the possibilities of errors 
of human intervention, etc.), but in our case 
such conveniences are not required since we are 
not obliged to work from the old schema syntactic 
expression to create a new schema syntactic 
expression.  Our schema syntactic expressions are 
merely alternative expressions of our abstract 
model expressions we maintain in our 
spreadsheets.  Hopefully we don't have errors 
when re-expressing the new syntactic model from 
revisions to the abstract model, but I'm hoping 
to be in a position to programmatically check that.

I hope this allays your concerns, Juerg.

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

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