[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Are people really using Identity constraints specif ied in
You are right that a Draconian parse constraint can't always be obeyed, but any sensible programmer knows that. On the other hand, it can't be ignored either. When XML was being designed, I don't think Tim Bray had C3I in mind for the web although weirdly enough, that is what the Internet was designed for. As to the public safety issue: A phone call is a phone call is a phone call. At the edge of any ecosystem, the boundary should be highly permeable. The more rigid structures are internal. Note the definition of ecotone. http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/projects/virtdept/ipvft/stop3.html It is a transition boundary. In a real time system, the question is, is the message actionable? Given an overlapping boundary, the ecotone, what actions are taken given an ambiguous message? In a Dispatch center, they use multiple sources of information to increase the precision of the response. 1. The person on the phone is highly agitated. The call desk is trained to calm them while continuing to get more precise information from them. 2. The call is traced to its location resulting in a geocoordinate used to provide to the responder the fastest route to the location of the incident. That is why you pay a tax for tower location or GPS location processing on your cell phone. In some cases, as soon as you dial 911, your cell phone begins to transmit the GPS location and locks up your ability to use it to place a call. This is a pain in the ass for a fender bender so beware of who you call first if there are no injuries. Also, information has been recorded about previous calls for service at that location to enable alerts to the responders. 3. The information is reused given a proper public safety system and here is where your question is more germane. It may be used, for example, to provide information to your utilities service provider so that they can also dispatch repair crews. This very handy in a major incident such as a hurricane. They may also communicate with other customer facing systems such as providers of gear, etc. The value of intelligence is in the way that you use it. Note that in public safety we can't set a goal of eviscerating our competitors. Given multiple jurisdictions, we have to interoperate with their software and hardware or we will eviscerate our customer's customer. That is you and me, Michael, so consider it a fundamental value of our business. In cases like this, the communication contract is vital and schema validation in real time can be very useful. We wouldn't stop the message: we'd use the schema as a fast cheap way to test it because it does have errors or exceptions, we need to know that as rapidly as possible. This is also true of intelligence exchanges where the intelligence is being fused for high level thin management to make not-quite-real time assessments for command and control such as asset disposition, mission planning, and so on. len From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@x...] Just curious ... hypothetically what could/should a public safety agency do with a CFS event that didn't conform to some future structural contract / schema that it was supposed to conform to? Obviously "nyah, nyah, invalid message, let the poor [expletive deleted] bleed" is not the right answer. On the other hand, letting the bug in somebody's procedures or code go un-reported is not a great idea either. I guess this echoes the eternal RSS/Atom debate over draconian error processing, and I suspect that all the myriad ways that RSS gets ill-formed in practice will be revisited as XML becomes pervasive in other situations. I'm thinking these days that schema validation has a big role to play in test-driven development but is of highly doubtful value in operational situations, or at least ones in which people can die or fortunes be lost if a message that is otherwise meaningful is rejected for "mechanical" XML reasons. Also, to address one of the issues that came up in this thread, I think that declarative vs procedural definition of the validation rules is a question that is orthogonal to this one. In general I agree with Roger's summary, but we can imagine "structural" constraints that could only be validated procedurally ['the value in field X must be a prime number' is the classic, if contrived example]. We can also imagine "semantic" constraints that could be validated with a declarative rule-based system, and anyway query languages such as SQL and XQuery seem to live in the fuzzy middle ground between declarative and procedural.
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