Emergency Management RIM SC Meeting Notes

02/28/2017

Attendees:

Rex Brooks

Jeff Waters

Elysa Jones

Emergency Management Reference Information Model Subcommittee Report/Discussion

We had a quorum.

Rex presented his importantwork and recommendations to harmonize the EDXL schemas, summarized in his white paper, “Issues in Harmonizing the EDXL Family.” This white paper described several issues needed to be considered to ensure the EDXL family of standards work well together and that they validate in both XMLSpy and Oxygen. The first issue, consuming the majority of the meeting discussion, recommended changes to EDXL-DE-v2.0, to address the errors encountered when trying to validate the DE2 schema in the XML editor XMLSpy. It appeared the problem was centered around conflicting XLink files; however, the concern was that this was only one symptom of a larger problem of multiple imports. The DE 2.0 had previously been validated using the XML editor Oxygen. Oxygen and XMLSpy differ in how they handle multiple imports, i.e. schema that are imported more than once into the same namespace. Oxygen ignores later imports and just keeps the first. XMLSpy tries to merge the imports. The XML specifications don’t address how to handle multiple imports and so neither approach is technically “wrong” and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. After the meeting concluded, the issue was reviewed and the following recommendations offered for consideration at the next meeting:

General Recommendations for the long term:

(1) Ideally, all of our schema should validate standalone in BOTH XMLSpy and Oxygen.

(2) Any import statements in any of the schemas in our EDXL standards, where the imported schema isn't used, should be removed.

(3) All imports should be local (so that everything validates standalone, i.e. disconnected from the web)

(4) Only one schema file should be imported into one namespace.
(5) Make a RIM recommendation to the EMTC that the EMTC "Require that any new EDXL standard have a zip with a standardized folder structure, including "xsdSchema", "importedSchema","xmlExamples", and "Require that everything in the zip file must be tested to validate with BOTH XMLSpy and Oxygen"

Specific Recommendations for the short term:

(1) Fix our common types schema to comply with the principles listed above. In other words, make sure the CT schemas have good imports and they validate with both XMLSpy and Oxygen. Do the same with edxl-ciq and edxl-gsf.

(2) Then include this new revised CT schema in the DE 2 (which will fix the current multi-import problem which derives from the CT problem). Fix any other problems to ensure DE2 complies with principles above.
(3) Then include this new CT in the SitRep and use the new DE2 in the SitRep examples. Do any further needed cleanup of SitRep to comply with above.

Other issues to be considered from Rex’s white paper include:

(2) Two differently named elements in HAVE and SitRep that address the same purpose.

(3) Normalizing and Standardizing the directory structures for our schema

(4) Non-substantive changes need to be made to TEP 1.1 and HAVE 2.0 to resolve schema validation issues in XMLSpy.

(5) Import cleanup needs to be done to TEP 1.1 and HAVE 2.0.

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned.

Respectfully Submitted,

Jeff Waters