Bring out Your Votes!

Work­ing in small tech­nic­al com­mit­tees on well-con­strained prob­lems can be really reward­ing; the small group allows for a cer­tain amount of fun in the meet­ings and every­one knows they have a role to play. I chair the OASIS Entity Res­ol­u­tion TC, which is work­ing on XML Catalogs.

The idea of cata­logs has been around for a long time, it was one of the first pieces of work to come out of SGML Open, the pre­curs­or to OASIS. We’ve updated them for XML and use on the Web and although we spend a lot of time explain­ing that entity res­ol­u­tion is not restric­ted to XML enti­tit­ies and indeed we use the word “entity” in the more gen­er­al sense of the word, i.e. we really mean “resource” in today’s ter­min­o­logy (see the FAQ for more on this), I think it’s a good piece of work. Mind you, hav­ing Norm edit it and write code to imple­ment it does help immensely. 

So now it’s time to vote! We need anoth­er 44 OASIS mem­ber com­pan­ies to vote (we need to reach a total of 47 “Yes” votes to pass) — so please pass this on to any vot­ing reps you know (yes, this is a shame­less lob­by­ing act for some­thing I think is worth­while). The bal­lot is at Approve XML Cata­logs v1.1 as an OASIS Stand­ard. Many thanks!

Some sup­port­ing inform­a­tion from the TC:

XML doc­u­ments and data often ref­er­ence oth­er extern­al resources. Often the ref­er­en­cing inform­a­tion is not suf­fi­cient to loc­ate the desired resource unam­bigu­ously, or the resource is not access­ible at the giv­en loc­a­tion at the time it is required, or it is prefer­able that an altern­ate resource be used in place of the ref­er­enced resource. 

For example:

1. Extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers may require resources that are not always avail­able. For example, a sys­tem iden­ti­fi­er that points to a resource on anoth­er machine may be inac­cess­ible if a net­work con­nec­tion is not available. 
2. Extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers may require pro­to­cols that are not access­ible to all of the tools on a single com­puter sys­tem. An extern­al iden­ti­fi­er that is addressed with the FTP pro­tocol, for example, is not access­ible to a tool that does not sup­port that protocol. 
3. It is often con­veni­ent to access resources using sys­tem iden­ti­fi­ers that point to loc­al resources. Exchan­ging doc­u­ments that refer to loc­al resources with oth­er sys­tems is prob­lem­at­ic at best and impossible at worst. 
4. Incom­ing XML doc­u­ments may ref­er­ence cus­tom­ized ver­sions of stand­ard XML schem­as. To pro­tect your sys­tems, it is neces­sary to remap the schema ref­er­ences so that known, trus­ted cop­ies of the schem­as are used. 

Entity Res­ol­u­tion is the pro­cess by which these resource ref­er­ences can be mapped to anoth­er ver­sion of the ref­er­ence that can be found or that is pre­ferred for oth­er reas­ons. To address these issues, the OASIS XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion defines an applic­a­tion-inde­pend­ent entity cata­log that maps extern­al iden­ti­fi­ers and URI ref­er­ences to (oth­er) URI references. 

Entity res­ol­u­tion cata­logs have already been widely imple­men­ted in much deployed soft­ware. Pro­mot­ing the OASIS XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion to an OASIS Stand­ard is cru­cial for con­tin­ued inter­op­er­ab­il­ity of XML applications.