[dsdl-comment] Some Schematron utilities

 
 1) On my blog I have an XSLT script that lets you convert a Schematron
schema into an ISO standard! It may be useful for people who want to
print out their constraints into a plain-language format suitable for
documentation, analysts and technical users.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/08/autogenerating_standards_from.html

2) Same blog has a stub of an XSLT, which just has elements for every
Schematron element and a little bit of sample code for handling
different kinds of paragraphs. This might be useful for people who are
who need to write their own pretty-printers or user interface
generators.

3) In my other news, our XSD-to-Schematron conversion project is
progressing well now. We put the XSD through 3 XSLT scripts to make a
file containing one super XSD schema for each namespace imported (each
of these schemas has all includes, and references to global
complexTypes, global groups, and global attributeGroups resolved by
substitution); this super XSD schema file simplifies the later transform
greatly, while still allowing us to handle multiple namespaces and
multiple layers of type derivation.

We will be making these XSLTs open source, because they are pretty
useful for people doing XSD-related work.

We are now working on the XSLT script to generate the Schematron schema:
so far we generate the correct patterns, rules and abstract rules for
elements, attributes and simple types. We model the built-in and
user-defined global simple types as abstract rules, using <sch:extends>
to model <xsd:restriction>. Finishing off the actual assertions for the
simple types should be comparatively trivial. The assertions for
handling the content models will follow the method in my blog here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/11/converting_content_models_to_s.html

What does using Schematron give you? Well, for a start it can make it
easier to turn on or off constraint checking for certain things: for
example we plan to have <phase> elements that allows checking by
namespace or content-only or data-values only. I expect our user will
have some good suggestions about what would be useful there. Also, it
can give you more opportunity to customize your messages, since it is
script based rather than compiled. Look for this in the next week or so.

Cheers
Rick

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