Report to the UBL TC Naming and Design Rules Subcommittee

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Report to the UBL TCNaming and Design Rules
Subcommittee

• Eve Maler
• NDR SC chair
• 22 January 2002
• www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/ndrsc/

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What does the NDR SC do?

• Charter Recommend to the TC rules and
  guidelines for normative-form schema design,
  instance design, and markup naming, and write and
  maintain documentation of these rules and
  guidelines
• The LC SC needs our recommendations right away
  we hope to work closely with them at this F2F to
  get feedback
• Im speaking under the SCs control today

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Current NDR SC members

• Bill Burcham
• Doug Bunting
• Dave Carlson
• Mavis Cournane
• Mark Crawford (editor, vice-chair)
• John Dumay
• Matt Gertner
• Arofan Gregory

• Eduardo Gutentag
• Eve Maler (chair)
• Dale McKay
• Joe Moeller
• Sue Probert
• Ron Schuldt
• Gunther Stuhec
• Mike Rawlins
• (thanks to all these folks for their hard work!)

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How our work is organized

• NDR document holds all our recommendations
• SC members champion issues by writing position
  papers
• Only decided issues are incorporated into the NDR
  document
• Not too many yet!
• First two critical areas are nearly cooked
• Our goal is to make rapid decisions on many of
  them this week

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NDR document status

• An outline and initial non-normative text have
  been developed based on other similar documents
• SC has done one review pass for organization and
  clarity
• In NDR document draft 04, note
• Design principles
• Informative vs. normative material
• Links to position papers
• Glossary

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Champions assigned(there will be more!)

• A-priority (we think)
• Schema language (Eve) done
• Legal issues (Dale) done
• Tag structure (Mark)
• Modnamver (Bill)
• Use cases (Dave)

• Others
• Design principles (Mark)
• Customization (Arofan) now owned by CM SC
• Elements vs. attribs (Gunther)
• Doc size/performance (Gunther)
• Code lists (Mike)
• Local vs. global elements (Dave)
• UBL CC relationship (Mark)
• TPA (Doug)

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First two recommendations

• Schema language
• Our source format for schema files will be W3C
  XML Schema
• Other formats may be generated from this
• Legal issues
• We sought advice on whether default values are a
  legal problem (as theyre absent from the
  instance but still part of the data)
• Advice we received implied terms have been
  acceptable for a long time

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Tag structure progress

• High structuring of markup names
• Abbreviate names in this pattern
• Truncate object class prefix when subelement can
  be used with several object classes
• Make such subelements local (not reusable, except
  as part of the complex type that defines it)
• Always use Details suffix for aggregates (or
  Document for top-level elements)
• Use judgment for subelements like AddressNumber
  that would be un-anchored without an object
  class
• Not sure yet about additional issues, such as
  usage of UDEF identifiers on elements

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Tag structure example

• Elements containing city information might be
  reusable in many locations airport city, rental
  car drop-off city, home address, etc.
• A CityName element would be defined in a complex
  type that gets used (directly or in derived form)
  to define all those object-class-providing
  parent elements
• The entire semantic for an instance of the
  element could be described with a simple XPath

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Modnamver progress nam

• One core namespace
• One namespace per root schema
• Where a root schema defines all global types for
  one functional area
• Possibility of intermediate namespaces (and thus
  roots) as we go along
• Likely for loading/performance reasons
• Not sure if namespace names will be URNs
• UBL extensions made by others must define their
  own namespaces
• Which hopefully are keyed to contexts

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Modnamver progress mod

• Encourage creation of new instance roots
  (individual document types) even for slightly
  different document forms
• Root schema for instance root may include several
  schema modules, and will import core root schema
• If intermediate levels get added, more roots will
  be imported at the various levels
• How to handle borrowing across functional
  areas?
• Core root schema will probably have an artificial
  root element
• For developer convenience

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Module structure
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Sample modules
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Modnamver progress ver

• Versions are associated with namespaces, not with
  individual modules
• We are considering a Major.Minor version number
  structure
• Based on backwards compatibility of the change
• Not sure how to encode the versions yet
• Attribute on root element? In namespace URI? As
  part of the context methodology?
• Not sure of relationship between core and
  functional namespace versions yet

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What we hope to accomplish this week

• Prioritize position papers, identify issues,
  identify and track dependencies between them, and
  then develop recommendations
• Work with the CM SC and LC SC to determine
  priorities and get feedback
• With a better understanding of interdependent
  issues, we can be more effective in our weekly
  meetings

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Agenda request

• Possible to meet in joint session with the CM SC
  and LC SC?
• Need to try out tag structure ideas
• Need to make sure we all understand each other
• Need to get a sense of priorities on additional
  NDR position papers

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Thank you

• Eve Maler
• NDR SC chair
• 22 January 2002
• www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/ndrsc/