XML Community of Practice
Meeting Notes
October 19, 2005
This meeting was hosted by the Department of the Navy’s (DON) Business Standards Committee at AT&T’s office in Vienna, Virginia.
After the participants introduced themselves, Owen Ambur announced that version 3 of the DoD 5015.2 standard for records management is available for review and comment. The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Records Management Profile, drafted by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), has been distributed for review by the CIO Council (CIOC). The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Release 0.1 has been published for public comment, at http://www.niem.gov/ The draft FEA Data Reference Model (DRM) 1.5 has also been released for public comment, and the DRM Implementation Through Iteration and Testing (ITIT) team is drafting a plan for DRM pilot projects. (Editor’s Note: OMB has decided to call it version 2.0 rather than 1.5.)
Together with Amin Hassam of i411, Inc., Owen briefed the group on the new submissions to the ET.gov site and demonstrated the enhanced, faceted search-and-discovery service prototype provided by i411 and Business Technology Source LLC at http://etgov.i411.com/index.jsp For example, proposed additions to the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Technical Reference Model (TRM) and Service Component Reference Model (SRM), respectively, can be seen at http://etgov.i411.com/etgov/WebSearchServlet?iv7=600 & http://etgov.i411.com/etgov/WebSearchServlet?iv3=200
Owen and Amin showed how a user can conduct free-text search of information, as well as browse the data by facets and by categories therein, providing context and scope (counts) of the records found at each step of the search. By drilling up, down or horizontally within and across facets (e.g., component type, TRM, SRM), users can access and find what they seek while also serendipitously discovering information of which they were unaware. A multifaceted approach will benefit users as information about emerging technologies broadens and deepens, by enabling them to make sense of the data without suffering from information overload. The prototype is a work-in-progress and refinements are ongoing.
Paul Macias of LMI updated the group on the status of the XML Naming and Design Rules and Guidelines (NDRG). Since Mark Crawford has left LMI to go to work for SAP, incorporation of the agreed upon changes to the draft NDRG has been delayed.
Owen indicated the NDRG should be flexible enough to accommodate the NRDs being issued by various agencies and communities of practice (CoPs), e.g., DON, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Global Justice/NIEM, etc. It should be less prescriptive about what agencies must do and more helpful about what they should do. However, agencies having the will and means to enforce the guidelines as rules should be encouraged to do so, and the more restrictive rules should apply to elements and schemas to be promoted to the Federal name space.
Paul explained that minor versions would not be as strictly controlled as previously proposed. Owen indicated minor versions should be indicated in the namespaces if changes to the schema affect backwards compatibility. He also reiterated his suggestion that indicating when backward compatibility is affected would be a good objective for the NIST tools, so that users will know when minor versions should be designated.
Paul noted that the same modularity approach as CCTS is being proposed, i.e., reuse of relatively small schemas rather than placing all of the elements in large, monolithic schemas or breaking all of the elements up into discrete namespaces for each element.
He also explained that the largest remaining unmet need is for contextual explanations of rules and examples of those that may otherwise be hard for readers to understand.
Since the document will never be “finished” in the sense that no further changes will ever be made, Owen suggested that the examples could be added later as part of a living document. In light of the need to provide a focus for discussion at the xmlCoP’s town hall meeting at the XML 2005 conference, Paul indicated that it should be possible to produce an updated draft of the NDRG in time for that meeting if the examples are excluded. Ken Sall suggested examples could be cited as external references, and he noted problems due to scale aren’t obvious without real world examples.
Owen noted that one of the changes that has been made in the draft NDRG is that the word “all” was removed from the Scope statement in three places. While the meaning of the statement is unchanged substantively speaking, the tone is now more appropriate with respect to the fact that most of the practices specified in the draft will be guidelines (SHOULD statements) rather than hard and fast rules (MUST statements).
Paul displayed the Standards Hierarchy slide and Owen noted that, while the preference is for use of industry standards, agencies may face a dilemma in choosing among competitive industry standards. Thus, some people believe that governmentwide standards should prevail. However, the thrust of the NDRG as well as OMB Circular A-119 is to encourage agencies to use voluntary consensus standards whenever possible and, when that is not possible, to advance agency and governmentwide standards for establishment as industrywide standards by recognized voluntary consensus standards organizations.
The draft assumes that a governance process similar to the (defunct) Federal EDI Standards Management Council (FESMC) will be formed. However, Owen questioned whether sufficient resources will be made available for such a governance process. He suggested the best hope may lie with the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) program management office, which has taken the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) as its initial basis and may grow into truly national information model encompassing all levels of government.
In any event, communities of practice need a means of publicizing the data elements and schemas they are developing and using as well as discovering those developed and used by others. The draft NDRG assumes that a run-time registry will be available at some point, and a new iteration of the CORE.gov site may serve that function. Owen noted that CORE.gov is in the process of being certified and accredited (C&A) for security purposes. He also noted that GSA and OMB have been conducting a requirements analysis for the next iterations of FEAMS and CORE.gov. He suggested that FEAMS should implement and become the core metamodel for the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) and, thus, contain the minimum metadata that should be included in the EA applications used by all agencies.
Paul concluded his presentation with a slide noting the distinction between document versus data-centric schemas. Someone pointed out that Betty Harvey had briefed the DON group the previous day concerning the aspects of XML Schema that does not apply well, if at all to documents. Consensus seemed to exist on the need to clarify the scope statement to indicate that the NDRG apply primarily to data-centric schemas. [Editor’s note: Betty’s presentation is available at http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SICoPPublicMeeting_2005_10_20#nid2ZJQ or, more specifically, at http://colab.cim3.net/file/work/SICoP/2005-10-20/NBSCPresentation.pdf
KC Morris noted that the guidelines might be considered to be more like profiles than “rules” per se.
Paul’s presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/lmi6/ndrg.htm
The next meeting of the xmlCoP will be conducted as a town hall meeting at the XML 2005 conference in Atlanta on the evening of November 15. The draft agenda is available at http://xml.gov/agenda/20051115.htm
GEFEG has offered to host a subsequent meeting for the purpose of presenting its Context Inspired Component Architecture (CICA) EDIFIX editing software and demonstrating its relationship to the FEA Data Reference Model (DRM).
Among those in physical attendance were:
Owen Ambur, xmlCoP
Puja Goyal, NIST
Bob Green, Navy
Amin Hassam, i411
Paul Macias, LMI
KC Morris, NIST
Brand Niemann, EPA
Sol Safran, IRS
Ken Sall, SAIC
Paul Sibbald, Software AG, Inc.
John Thomas, BearingPoint
John Triplett, IRS
John Weiland, NMIMC/Navy
However, this listing is incomplete. Among others who attended the Navy BSC’s three-day meeting and may have been present during the xmlCoP meeting were the following:
Margaret Birch, Navy
Curtis Blais, Naval Postgraduate School (via telecon)
Tom Brown, Navy
Don Brutzman, Navy
Cory Casanave, Data Access Technologies/GSA OCIO
Kevin Charlow, Navy
Gina Cicotello, Best Value Technologies, Inc. (BVTI)
Mark Crayton, Navy
Darrell Diggs, Navy
Kathryn Flitter, Naval Surface Warfare Center
Heather Gazdik, imteaminc.com
Michael Grimley, Navy
Katie Haritos-Shea, Treasury
Betty Harvey, eccnet.com
Harlan Hersey, CSC
John Junod, Navy
Serm Kinluatanyou, NIST
Joshua Lubell, NIST
Li-Ming Koo, SSA
Robert Lewis, Navy
Josh Lubell, NIST
Jolene Marshall, Navy
David Neff, Navy
Quyen Nguyen, NIST
Maria Reis, gdeb.com
Penny Scheatzle, Navy
Maureen Shutty, Navy
Bob Starek, Navy
Steve Turman, Navy
Cedric Vessel, DISA
David Webber, NIH
Lori Westbrook, Navy Logistics & Readiness
Collista Wiggins, DISA
Kim Willmott, USAF
Patrick O.(Shaun) Young, BTAS, Inc.
Jerry Yurow, DOE
Among those who identified themselves as participating via teleconference were:
Allyson Ugarte, XBRL Spain & US
Sylvia Webb, GEFEG US
Please convey any additions or corrections to Owen_Ambur@ios.doi.gov