[dsdl-discuss] Re: Potential use cases for complex value validation from ebXML

Rick

>> The question comes as to whether an enumeration is actually a datatype,
or
> whether it sits in a different validation phase.

>That is an interesting point. Are you saying that an enumeration is
really a kind of link (whose other end may not be well defined)?

Yes. Can you match what is at one end of the link with an entry at the other
end.

> So you need a mechanism where a
> local enumeration list includes an externally defined one. You also need
to
> be able to subset enumeration lists. The example I am forever quoting here
> is the need to identify the current list of members in the European Union
> using ISO 3166 codes. At present we have some additional countries that
have
> some or all of the EU rights while the bid for accession. Therefore for
> certain applications at the European Commission they need to validate
> whether the country code is a) a valid EU country b) a currently
> acknowledged accession country c) a country, like Switzerland, that has
> neither status but has special arrangements within the field under study
> (e.g. within IST research projects). So we need to include a subset of ISO
> 3166 and add two lists that are maintained independently but derived from
> ISO 3166 to this subset to create our enumeration, without having to
define
> any entries per se as all are "standardized country identifiers".

Your proposed solution for the above problem will not work because it
presumes the subsetting of the list of entries will be done by adding
suitable attributes to the registered set. ISO will not maintain a list of
the relevant properties. The whole point is that the subsetting must be
associated with the validation schema while the enumerated list is
maintained elsewhere by a totally different organization.

> >ISO 3166 is causing headache because of the 2 letter and 3 letter forms.
> If we can cope with that (two lexical forms, one value space!) we would be
> ahead.
>
> I don't see this as a problem. They are two seperately maintained lists.
> What we need, as in the example above, is the ability to create a list
that
> includes the two lists.

The general problem is when migrating from one lexical space to another,
how to enforce and establish equivalence between different lexical forms,
I think.

There is no equivalence between the two lists. You either use the entry from
one list or from another. (If I remember correctly ISO 3166 specifically
forbids the use of the two lists in parallel.)

> >It would be great if we could have some way to validate that
> IDs are unique within a collection of documents.
>
> Is this a real world problem, or should we simply namespace IDs with the
URL
> of the document containing it to create a UUID of the form
> http://www.mysite.org/mydoc.xml?id[abc] which, after all, is the XPath
> needed to identify the ID?

My point here was that there exists a perfectly good XML mechanism for
identifying IDs absolutely uniquely, so why invent something else?

Martin Bryan

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