New CAM v1.8 released - enhanced blueprint and canonical XML dictionaryt

This release consolidates 4 months of development work on both CAMeditor and CAMV for the OASIS CAM (Content Assembly Mechanism), and is the first for the 2010 “Alyeska” series.

Highlights

Using these latest CAM tools any standards group can now publish their information exchange definitions as a sets of concise blueprints coupled with a canonical XML dictionary of the exchange components. This then allows developers to rapidly create tailored XSD schema and XML transaction instances along with their documentation directly by using the CAM tools.  This contrasts with previous practice of publishing complex W3C Schemas that is difficult, time consuming and costly for developers to make interoperable, maintain and support.

The CAM canonical XML dictionary format is compatible with Microsoft Excel™ and utilizes the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) definitions thus making it accessible to business analysts to review the available data definitions for blueprint construction and extension. Blueprints also support the NIEM.gov approach to interoperable information exchange development.  The schema generator supports OASIS and NIEM standard layouts.

The project vision is to provide the leading open source toolset for implementing standards based information exchanges with XML. Simplifying and speeding the development process and enhancing the quality of your resulting schema for superior XML exchanges.  To date the project has had over seventeen thousand file downloads from the Sourceforge.net resource site (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor).

Technical Details

For the CAMV validation engine this provides the latest V1.1.3 production release. Upgrades to the integration with the CAMeditor have been completed including support for the latest warning and information message handling validations reporting.

For the CAMeditor significant changes include improvements for the Blueprint Expander, the canonical XML dictionary details, the XSD generation, XML example and the Renamer tools. 

Added is the ability to generate XSD schema using folder structures by namespace extension and type (subset, extension, exchange, and external) along with customized header and footer documentation text.  This powerful feature has built-in mappings for NIEM 2.0, NIEM 2.1, LEXS and OASIS schemas.  Custom mappings can be locally configured to match developer tooling needs.

Other significant changes include support for spell checking of XML component names (elements and attributes), better handling of ERwin XSD models, and enhanced renaming and refactoring tools to align SQL models to NIEM naming and design rules.  Various NIEM related enhancements have been made in support of better IEPD generation (http://www.niem.gov/).  CAMeditor is built using Eclipse, Java, and Saxon xslt and is cross-platform deployable.

More information on how the CAM methodology can accelerate your information exchange development through the application of XML component dictionaries and blueprints can be found at the OASIS web site:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=36146