Notes from DFDL call 2007-05-09 Mike Beckerle Simon Parker Martin Westhead Suman Kalia Geoff Judd Steve Hanson Alan Powell Notes: Simon Parker of PolarLake was introduced. Welcome Simon! Report from OGF 20 approximately 12 attendees at session Notes from session are posted/sent by email. We discussed the notes: pointers - not core for v1.0, . A supplement would be ok. multi-dim arrays - pointed out that we can do these via nesting, though there are some drawbacks about storage order variation. support for versioning - we agreed that we want to be compatible with versioning approaches of DFDL schemas by users, but not address the problem in the standard. It's not different for DFDL from XML Schema. we need to revisit "selectors" topic since these could be used to mix versions of a format into the same DFDL schema. ISO CGM - common graphics metafile - suggested as a use case. New floating point number formats, e..g., small ones like 14 bit ones used in graphics and such. We discussed whether there should be special DFDL-based annotations that DFDL processors would provide visibility to for applications. Alternative is "just look for the annotation on the schema", i.e., leave it up to the applications to reach into the schema themselves. DFDL stays out of this. 2nd point was that spec. needs to specify how various supported floating point formats are approximated when converted to the XML types float and double. We decided that advanced floating point could be a supplement. Validation: decided to mention in spec that streaming validation is an allowed behavior for DFDL processors, and that if XML-schema or schematron validation is performed by a DFDL processor that it must be consistent with an XML Schema validator operating on an XML document as described by the implied XML schema for the DFDL schema. Issue raised - need "arbitrary whitespace" as delmiter. How to specify. Issue raised - need arbitrary sized binary integer (or even decimal), Bignums. Financial communities use these. Selectors - need to revisit in a future call. Mike Beckerle STSM, Architect, Scalable Computing IBM Software Group Information Platform and Solutions Westborough, MA 01581 direct: voice and FAX 508-599-7148 assistant: Pam Riordan priordan@us.ibm.com 508-599-7046