Switch to W3C XLink

Ben Caradoc-Davies added a comment - 22/Apr/12 9:06 PM - edited Here is the full text of Carl Reed's April 2012 email to an OGC TC mailing list. I am including it here without permission to promote and publicise this change, in the hope that such republication will help Carl achieve his stated goals (please let me know if this annoys any one): Dear TC -   At the 2011 Brussels meeting, the TC and the PC approved a motion to the effect that:   The OGC shall follow the XLink guidance as defined in the W3C XLink 1.1 recommendation: http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink11/ . The motion further stated that 1.) all existing OGC standards that reference the OGC XLink shall be updated to reference the W3C XLink schema and 2.) that going forward any new standards work shall only reference the W3C XLink schema. At the same time, there is also a related XLink schema change so that simpleAttrs is used.   Specifically:   http://schemas.opengis.net/xlink/1.0.0/xlinks.xsd will be changed to http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink.xsd and xlink:simpleLink will be changed to xlink: simpleAttrs )   The target date for implementing change is the weekend of July 21, 2012.   The process will be:   1. Scan schema repository for import of xlink to find a list of standards that use xlink. 2. Also scan for strings such as Gml:ReferenceType to find other possible places that xlink is required. 3. Whatever schema uses any of XLink schema components will need to replace the schema location. We need to do this for all schemas that import xlink. All these changes will be done to a copy of the existing OGC schema repository. 4. For software developers, they need to patch their products to use the revised OGC schemas. 5. Everyone will need to delete local copies, get a new copy from the OGC schema repository, and use the new schemas. There is also the possibility to use a tool such as the OASIS XML Catalogue to override the required change and to continue using the old XLink. 6. In July, we will then issue one global corrigendum for all the affected standards. Essentially, the current OGC schema repository will be replaced with the schemas that have been changed (and tested)The actual standards documents will not change – only the schemas. OGC policy is that the schemas are normative and that if there are differences between a standards document and a schema, then the schemas are normative.   Concurrently, we need aggressive OUTREACH, OUTREACH, OUTREACH to inform and educate the implementation and user community. For example, we need to   Coordinate with TC 211 Coordinate with OASIS Coordinate with the GeoSciML community Coordinate with INSPIRE Inform all technology developers that they need to check their offerings and determine what (if any) changes they need to make. Not just OGC Members but the whole community! Coordinate with the Open Source community also Use LinkedIn, Blogs, and other social media.   Below is a preliminary list of the OGC standards (and versions) impacted by this change   All versions of WM context All versions of GML since version 2.0.0 All profiles of GML since 2.0.0 Image CRSs All versions of OpenLS since version 1.1.0 All versions of OWS Common since 1.0.0 Symbology Encoding 1.0 All versions of SLD since 1.0.0 All versions of SensorML (including 2.0) All versions of SWE Common Table Join Service All versions of Web Coverage Service Web Feature Service 2.0 Web Map Service 1.3 WMTS Web Processing Service   There is a long history to the requirement for the XLink situation, including the fact that back in the GML 2.0.0 days W3C did not have a supported XLink schema available. Using the OGC XLink schema was fine until very recently when the US Government issued a mandate that XLink 1.1 shall be used in any XML schema.   If you have any questions, please direct them to the OGC Architecture Board ( oab@lists.opengeospatial.org )   Thanks and regards   Carl Reed, PhD CTO and Executive Director Standards Program Open Geospatial Consortium www.opengeospatial.org The OGC: Making Location Count!