Change Marking for Schemas

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

In the first session of SC34 WG6 in Stockholm, today, I heard a brief
mention of the difficulty of change-marking a schema.

I concur.  In terms of something that could be applied to the schema, one
would need to use technical DIFF and merging techniques.  These are not
quite the things needed for human review for the significance and
consequences of the changes.

However, for analysis purposes, it is quite possible to produce
change-tracking documents that are often good enough.  I offer the
attachment as evidence.  (If the attachment fails to come through on the
list, let me know and I will put it where it can be reached on the web.)

This sort of thing will be insufficient for schemas that have been replaced
by a semantically-equivalent but syntactically quite-different one
(including ones where there is significant change to how prefixes are bound
to even the same Namespace URIs).

The magical incantations by which I produced the attachment may be
insufficient for comparison of the ODF 1.2 Part 1 main schema with that of
the ODF 1.1 schema.  I will try that next.

If we simplify the ODF 1.2 Part 1 main schema in ways that have been
proposed (for elimination of a systematic use of "combine"), the comparison
will be more difficult.  It will then require serious RNG technical
expertise and specialized computer tools to find any technical difference
with respect to previous schemas.

However, I expect this crude change-marking will work quite well in looking
for changes between the ODF 1.0 main schema and the ODF 1.1 main schema.  

 - Dennis

Dennis E. Hamilton
------------------
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability 
mailto:Dennis.Hamilton at acm.org | gsm:+1-206.779.9430 
http://NuovoDoc.com http://ODMA.info/dev/ http://nfoWorks.org 
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