[dsdl-discuss] Re: Part 3, correctly formatted

Martin Bryan wrote:
> Rick
>
> Bad news is that I've been wasting the holiday weekend reading JTC1
> directives (my excuse is that its raining!)
>
> I note that in Part 3 there is no statement relating to patents. ISO policy
> requires us to have a clear statement on this issue.

As I said last week, I am now not aware of any patents that cover
Schematron.

Is Schematron a PAS spec? ...I thought not. I went through the
Directives Part 1 previously, and I believe they do not require more action.

When I say "I am not aware", please note that I have investigated the
only patent I could find in this area, and communicated with the license
holders. We believe there are significant differences between the
patented technology and Schematron:

   1) Their patent requires links to be generated; Schematron does not
    mention links

   2) Their patent concerns consistency not validation (e.g., that
    if the same datum appears in two different documents, the same
    value should be used)

   3) Their patent requires sets of (multiple documents); Schematron
   does not mention sets of documents, and works from a single document

   4) Their patent applies to checks after "structure" has been checked
    or validated (e.g. by DTD or other schema language)

   5) Also, on my reading of the wording of the patent, their patent
    is further limited to value-value checks (The patent-holder is
    a little surprised by this reading, because it was not their intent,
    but has not denied my reading on this issue.)

The patent-holder has told me that the Patent Office mentioned to them
prior art on using SQL to validate databases; also there was my
paper on using XSLT to validate XML, so please be clear that their
patent *in no way* concerns the framework of using a query language
to check validity.

I have suggested to the license holders that they may care to
submit their CLiX language as part of DSDL (Part 3 bis?). It
is also a rule-based language for validation, but it uses a
different kind of logic to Schematron, and is much more
high-level. I think it would be a valuable addition.

> An editor is supposed to determine for material taken from external sources:
> a) How willing are the organisation and its members to meet the ISO/IEC
> policy on these matters?
>
> b) What patent rights, covering any item of the proposal, is a PAS owner
> aware of?
>
> For referenced standards we are supposed to check:
>
> What is the status of meeting the ISO/IEC policy on patent matters?
>
> Could I ask you to make some clear statement re Schematron in this issue.

  Can you suggest any appropriate wording, so that the other parts can
also use them? Will other parts have these?

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

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