Re: Best Practices for Establishing Namespace Name

Henry,

     Long time no chat, hope all your pipes are clear and no ciphers!

     I am sitting here at home, on extended sick leave, and I feel like I am
the only audience to a horror movie, the only one who happens to be privy
to a host of disparate pieces of arcane information which, taken all together,
show a number of protagonists walking blind into your typical disaster ...
there are some large constituencies with some pretty basic assumptions
which stand to fall apart without a standard on namespaces and schema versions.

     Here are the pieces that I know of:

     International Standards Organization standard 19115, geographic Information,
Metadata, which has been in place for 5 years and garnered considerable respect
and a few good tries at compliance.  It is currently undergoing 5-year review with
the reasonable expectation that there will be some changes.

     ISO 19115-2, an extension of the above for Remote Sensing applications.

     ISO 19139, an XML encoding of the 19115 standard.  does not include 19115-2.
Includes a set of W3C schema language schemas and some additional business rules.
The ISO does provide and maintain a namespace with the schemas.

     A set of schemas written between 2 and 3 years ago by a gentleman working for
US DOD defense mapping agency-or-whatever-they-were-called-at-the-time.
the gentleman died suddenly.  the schemas differ significantly from the 19139 schemas
but this information is not generally known.  The schemas are used by data creation and editing software owned, sold and maintained by CARIS, the dominant nautical
chartmaking software company worldwide.  many (1000+?) datasets now exist
using these.

     A text document in the final stages of approval, known as "The North American Profile (NAP)" of 19115, which involves only a couple of simple but important restrictions  of the existing 19139 schemas.  At least one of my colleagues attempting to write a different set of schemas according to this document and to file them in a different namespace.  A US Government inter-agency committee (FGDC) which has the power to mandate that all US govt agencies use these schemas is contemplating their own set on their own namespace.

   An on-going effort (at least 14 years by my reckoning ...)by a group known as TSMAD under the auspices of the International Hydrographic Organization to develop a standard for nautical data which may incorporate the 19115 standard or the 19139
schemas and will certainly label anything originating in North America as unacceptable,
and may require the US nautical chartmaking authorities to employ it.

     Now I am quite confident in your ability to surmise some of the impending difficulties.

    so, my question is, is it time for me to retire and leave this theatre?  Or is there hope?

tx,
John Tucker


----- Original Message -----
From: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)
Date: Friday, September 4, 2009 6:53 am
Subject: Re: Best Practices for Establishing Namespace Name
To: "Tsao, Scott" <scott.tsao@boeing.com>
Cc: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>, xmlschema-dev@w3.org


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> Tsao, Scott writes:
> 
> > Henry,
> >
> > Thanks for the confirmation!
> >  
> > Is this the document you were referring to as far as W3C TAG's strong
> > recommendation is concerned:
> >  ?
> 
> Yes, although
> 
>  a) It has not yet been officially adopted as a TAG finding;
> 
>  b) (as you can see from the date) that document has stalled, and a
>     shorter and simpler one is in preparation:
> 
>       
> 
>     BUT that one hasn't been adopted yet either, so it's not suitable
>     to point to it as the TAG's settled position. . .
> 
> If you find the discussion in either of those documents helpful,
> great, but just be careful to cite them as work-in-progress, if at
> all.
> 
> ht
> - -- 
>        Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
>                          Half-time member of W3C Team
>       10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
>                 Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
>                        URL: 
> [mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is 
> forged spam]
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Received on Tuesday, 8 September 2009 19:59:58 UTC