OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) TC

 View Only

RE: [ubl] urgent ndr rules question/clarification

  • 1.  RE: [ubl] urgent ndr rules question/clarification

    Posted 02-24-2005 20:21
     MHonArc v2.5.0b2 -->
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

    ubl message

    [Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


    Subject: RE: [ubl] urgent ndr rules question/clarification


    Anne:
    
    Anne:
    
    Since I stopped being an active participant and a lurker, I do not
    generally comment, but this is an incredibly serious issue that you
    raise.
    
    If you change this versioning scheme, you will absolutely invalidate a
    lot of the underlying thinking within NDR concerning the use of
    namespaces, modularity, and many other details, such as the naming
    conventions. These issues were debated long and hard within NDR while I
    was still active in the group, and abandoning them has some pretty
    drastic consequences:
    
    - You completely invalidate the approach to extension/customization, and
    the work done in that area, as it relies on the schema exhibiting the
    inheritance in a processable fashion across versions.
    
    - You run the risk of producing non-backward-compatible changes in minor
    versions, which are, under the current scheme, disallowed by the
    extension and derivation features of XML schema.
    
    - You render pointless many of the decisions about modularity and
    packaging, which assumed the current NDR kind of extension/derivation
    mechanism being in place. The impact of this would be a *lot* of re-work
    of the existing NDR, at a minimum a lot of analysis.
    
    - You invalidate the naming rules in NDR, vis-�-vis ebXML Core
    Components spec (names across versions, even if having different,
    modified content, must be dis-ambiguated by their namespaces, while
    maintaining their identity and their names, as derived from the
    corresponding BIE. NDR uses the extension/derivation features of schema
    to reflect this).
    
    Changes to the spreadsheets cannot be so (incredibly) huge: all you need
    to know is if a specific construct is being inherited from a minor
    version, or is new to the current one. (Ideally, the spreadsheets for
    each version would contain only new information, but I gather that is
    not how they've been constructed.)
    
    Add a column to the spreadsheet which identifies the version of each
    construct, identify the differences, and output them. Since the names of
    types and elements must be the same across minor versions -
    disambiguated only by their namespaces - then the names of the types and
    elements are predictable.
    
    I'm sure this is not a simple task, and I don't mean to trivialize it,
    but it is worth the effort it will take. Otherwise, NDR will simply have
    stopped making sense, as we will have compromised the integrity of the
    design in very serious (IMHO fatal) ways.
    
    Cheers,
    
    Arofan Gregory