Open Grid Forum: Data Format Description Language Working Group OGF DFDL Working Group Call, May-27-2009 Meeting opened, 14:00 UK Attendees Steve Hanson (IBM) Mike Beckerle (Oco) Suman Kalia (IBM) Alan Powell (IBM) Apologies Agenda: 1. Go through actions. Updated below: 2. Completing DFDL V1 3. AOB Next call 04 June 14:00 UK Scheduled for 2 hours Meeting closed, 15:10 UK Actions raised at this meeting No Action 050 27/05: xs:any currently limited to initiated text element. Is this sufficient? Should xs:any in its current form be deferred? Current Actions: No Action 012 AP/SH: Update decimalCalendarScheme 10/9: Not allocated yet 17/9: No update 24/9: Add calendar binary formats to actions 22/10: No progress 16/1: proposal distributed and discussed. Will be redistributed 21/1: add locale, 04/02: changed from locale to specific properties 18/2: Need more investigation of ICU strict/lax behaviour. 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: AP to complete asap once the ICU strict/lax behaviour is understood. 29/04: No progress 06/05: No progress 13/05: Calendar has been added to latest spec version v034 but still a few details to clarify. 20/05: No Progress 27/05: No Progress 026 SH: Envelopes and Payloads 08/04: Not discussed explicity, but recursive use of DFDL is tied up with this 22/04: Two aspects. Firstly compositional - do sufficient mechanisms exist to model an envelope with a payload that varies. Secondly markup syntax - this might be defined in the envelope. The second of these is very much tied up with the variable markup action 028, so will be considered there. SH to verify the composition aspect. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. related to Action 028 06/05: No progress 06/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Still a number of aspects to be decided. - Compostion - Does the envelope and payload need to be defined in the same schema or should they be dynamically bound at runtime? - Compostion- How is a variable payload specified. Choice or xs:any; New action raised to discuss xs:any - extracting dymanic syntax from data. Covered by action 029 valuecalc. 027 SH: Property precedence tables 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Two things missing from the existing precedence trees. Firstly, does not show alternates (eg, initiator v initiatorkind). Secondly, need a tree per concrete DFDL object (eg, element). SH to update. 29/04: No progress 06/05: SH is updating tables which will be ready for next call 13/05: SH emailed updated version. AP commented.. See minutes for issues and property changes. 20/05: Updated version circulated. Review before next call and be ready for vote. 27/05: Updated version circulated. more comments raised. 028 SH: Variable markup 08/04: Discussed briefly at end of call, IBM to see whether there any use cases that require recursive use of DFDL. 15/04: Use case was distributed and will be discussed on next call. 22/04: The use case in question is EDI where the terminating markup for the payload segments is defined in the ISA envelope segment. The markup is modelled as an element of simple type where the allowable markup values are defined as enums on the type. But we need to handle two cases - firstly where the envelope is present, so the value used by the payload is taken from the envelope. Secondly where only the payload is present. Here we need a way of scanning for all the enum values, and adopting the one we actually find, when parsing. And using a default when unparsing. SH to explore use of a DFDL variable, where the variable has a default, but also has a type that is the same as the markup element - that way we get to use the enums without defining everything twice. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. 06/05: No progress 13/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Progress made and will tie to other actions 029 MB: valueCalc (output length calculation) 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Action allocated to MB, this is to complete the work started at the Hursley WG F2F meeting. 29/04: No progress 06/05: MB will have update for next call 13/05: MB will have update for next call 20/05: Some progress. will be circulated this week 27/05: MB circulated proposal and got comments. Will update and review on next call 032 DG: Investigate compatibility between DFDL infoset and XDM 08/04: No update 22/04: No update 29/04: No update 06/05: DG indicates will have update next week 13/05: see minutes 20/05: No Progress 27/05: No Progress - Dave can you indicate status? 033 AP/TK: Assert/Discriminator semantics. AP to document. TK to check uses of discriminator besides choice. 08/04: In progress within IBM 22/04: Waiting for TK to return from leave to complete. 29/04: TK has sent examples shown need for discriminators beyond choice. Agreed. MB to respond to TK 06/05: Discussed suggestion of adding type indicator to discriminator. MB to provide examples. 15/03: Semantic documented in v034. MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator 20/05: MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator (but lower priority than action 029) 27/05: No Progress (lower priority) 036 SH: Provide use case for floating component in a sequence 08/04: Raised 15/04: Use case sent and discussed. SH to do further investigation 22/04: IBM feedback from WTX team is that alternate suggested ways of modelling the EDI floating NTE segment have significant usability issues. The DFDL principle is that for a problem that can be expressed as two-layered, then two DFDL models are needed. The EDI NTE segment does not fall into this though, as its use is on a per sequence basis. Ongoing. 29/04: Agreed that need to be in V1. SH to make a proposal 06/05: No progress 20/05: SH has almost completed the proposal 27/05: Proposal circulated and approved 037 All: Approach for XML Schema 1.0 UPA checks. 22/04: Several non-XML models, when expressed in their most obvious DFDL Schema form, would fail XML Schema 1.0 Unique Particle Attribution checks that police model ambiguity. And even re-jigging the model sometimes fails to fix this. Note this is equally applicable to XMl Schema 1.1 and 1.0. While the DFDL parser/unparser can happily resolve the ambiguities, the issue is one of definition. If an XSD editor that implements UPA checks is used to create DFDL Schema, then errors will be flagged. DFDL may have to adopt the position that: a)DFDL parser/unparser will not implement some/all UPA checks (exact checks tbd) b) XML Schema editors that implement UPA checks will not be suitable for all DFDL models c) If DFDL annotations are removed, the resulting pure XSD will not always be valid (ie, the equivalent XML is ambiguous and can't be modelled by XML Schema 1.0) Ongoing in case another solution can be found. 29/04: Will ask DG and S Gao for opinion before closing 06/05: Discussed S Gao email and suggestions. Decided need to review all XML UPA rules and decide which apply to dfdl. 20/05: SH or SKK to investigate 27/05: No Progress 038 MB: Submit response to OMG RFI for non-XML standardization 22/04: First step is for MB to mail the OGF Data Area chair to say that we want to submit 29/04: MB has been in contact with OMG and will sunbit dfdl. 06/05: MB has prepared response to OMG. Will send DFDL sepc v033 20/05: Response has been sent to OMG based on v034 27/05: Awaiting response from OMG. 042 MB: Complete variable specification. To include how properties such as encoding can be set externally. Must be a known variable name. 06/05: No progress 20/05: AP to make proposal 27/05: MB proposed differentiating between input and output variables to avoid unnecessary evaluations during parse and unparse. Need to complete rest of variable specification. 043 13/05: Types in the infoset. Currently infoset types have defined value space but that implies a parser would have to validate input. Is this correct? 20/05: SH No progress 27/05: No Progress 044 13/05: Bidi 20/05: AP: will check what IBM products support. 27/05: Bidi is supported so will be needed in dfdl v1 045 20/05 AP: Speculative Parsing 27/05: Psuedo code has been circulated. Review for next call 047 20/05 AP: Scoping for non-format annotations 27/05: Discussed briefly. AP to distribute 048 20/05: AP investigate Restart 27/05: Suggest RESTART is not part of the scope for DFDL. 049 20/05 AP Built-in specification description and schemas 050 27/05: xs:any currently limited to initiated text element. Is this sufficient? Should xs:any in its current form be deferred? Closed actions: 046 20/05 AP: Document changes to simple type scoping 27/05: Closed moved to work item Work items: No Item target version status 003 Variables - ??, 2008 (Mike) 005 Improvements on property descriptions - ??, 2008 (All - split TBD) 006 Envelopes and Payloads (Steve) - Apr 30, 2008 007 (from draft 32) valueCalc (Mike) - ??, 2008 mostly complete 008 (from draft 32) Property precedence for writing (Steve) - under review 009 (from draft 32) Variable markup (Steve) - Mar 31, 2008 proposal needs writing up 011 (from draft 32) How speculative parsing works (combining choice and variable-occurence - currently these are separate) ??, 2008 (IBM) in progress 012 (from draft 32) Reordering the properties discussion: move representation earlier, improve flow of topics ??, 2008 (Alan) not started 027 Calendar schemes 034 032 Floating components 033 Changes from action 020 and 027 - renaming properties etc 035 Remove unorderedInitiated, add initiated content (a041) 036 Update dfdl schema with change properties (Suman) 037 Infoset text codepage 038 Improve length section 039 Change scoping of simple types (A 046) Alan Powell MP 211, IBM UK Labs, Hursley, Winchester, SO21 2JN, England Notes Id: Alan Powell/UK/IBM email: alan_powell@uk.ibm.com Tel: +44 (0)1962 815073 Fax: +44 (0)1962 816898 Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. 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