{"id":1211,"date":"2005-11-09T04:59:01","date_gmt":"2005-11-09T14:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/?p=1211"},"modified":"2013-11-12T21:21:01","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T02:21:01","slug":"20051109-0-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/2005\/11\/20051109-0-3\/","title":{"rendered":"XML schema design patterns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the hard things I think about at work is the implications of Data Modelling practices vs XML schema development practices. As an example, there are a lot of folks in the DoD who are enthusiastic about the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/C2IEDM\">Command-and-Control Information Exchange Data Model<\/a> (C2IEDM), a data model developed by the <a href=\"https:\/\/mipsite.lsec.dnd.ca\/Pages\/Default.aspx\">Multilateral Interoperability Programme<\/a> (MIP).<\/p>\n<p>I have concern that Data Modelling, as a practice, results in good ways to represent information at rest, but that it does not do a good job of developing mechanisms to exchange information. I.e. data modellers define database structures, but do not define languages.<\/p>\n<p>There is a tendency to create good data models, and then run a script to generate the associated XML schema. I worry that this is not sufficient &#8211; the resulting XML schema will be good for database replication, but not be useful for anything else.<\/p>\n<p>As an aside, the documentation of the 2002 version of C2IEDM (known as the LC2IEDM) is 315 pages long. The US Air Force, (and others) use a XML schema known as <a href=\"http:\/\/cot.mitre.org\/\">Cursor-on-Target<\/a> for exchange of C2 data that has 13 elements and can be reasonably documented in about 11 pages. (more <a href=\"http:\/\/www.military-information-technology.com\/article.cfm?DocID=596\">here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>C2IEDM and CoT are not pure-competitors; any comparison is not apples-to-apples. In fact, they may be complementary&#8230; C2IEDM is a data model, CoT is an XML schema. In other words, CoT can be used to communicate the data that C2IEDM models.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway &#8211; most of my concerns are unproven, and understanding the problem will require more thought. I was inspired to blog about this today largely because I stumbled across an article on XML schema: Best Practices called &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.xfront.com\/GlobalVersusLocal.html\">Global vs Local<\/a>&#8221; that I wanted to link to for future reference that I think has some nuggets that apply to these problems.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the hard things I think about at work is the implications of Data Modelling practices vs XML schema development practices. As an example, there are a lot of folks in the DoD who are enthusiastic about the Command-and-Control Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM), a data model developed by the Multilateral Interoperability Programme (MIP). [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1239,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions\/1239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}