CAM editor NIEM Evaluation Report

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Synopsis of Evaluation Performed

Overview – Public Sector NIEM Team, March 2012

NIEMTest Model Data

Deploy Requirements

Build Exchange

GenerateDictionary

XML Exchange Development

CAM Template Evaluation Report

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Slide 2


CAM Template Evaluation Report

• The purpose of the CAM template evaluation report is

to provide a suite of checks against a template that

are difficult, tedious or otherwise to determine by

manual inspection of a template structure and its

associated rules and annotation details

• The report covers the following areas:• alerts users to potential issues with their template and

provides suggestions for improving the functional details

• addresses logical and conceptual issues that simple syntax

checking alone does not flag

• can be used as part of a formal review process to ensure a

baseline for quality control


Contents

• Evaluation Reporting

• Comparison to NIEM NDR

• Percentage component reuse scoring

• Target Schema generation considerations

• Summary and Review


EVALUATION REPORTING

Understanding process details


Evaluation Report Specifics

• The CAM template evaluation report serves multiple

purposes including:• Basic logical error checking on rules used, e.g. duplicates,

conflicted, erroneous

• Naming and Design Rule (NDR) guidelines checking

• Interoperability flagging of known problematic aspects of

schema use in information exchange messaging

• Support for spell checking of XML element and attribute

names

• Consistency checking (e.g. does the name representation

term match the physical type definition)

• Missing rules for code and other constrained content types


Basic logical error checking on rules• These checks review the actual template rules themselves for

basic issues including:

• Duplicates of same rule type

• Conflicted rules – optional and mandatory

• Warning for setChoice rule where only one node applicable

• These checks are designed to ensure the rules will not cause

issues when evaluated by the CAMV validation engine


Naming and Design Rule (NDR)• The NDR checks are based on the Core Components Technical

Specification (CCTS) as interpreted by the NIEM NDR guidelines.

• Consistency in use of upper and lowercase naming convention is

checked

• The naming representation terms are inspected for leaf element

items and attributes

• The naming convention is evaluated to look for use of these terms

in the name itself (representation terms): 'Amount', 'Count', 'BinaryObject',

'Graphic', 'Picture', 'Sound', 'Video', 'Image', 'Code', 'Category', 'Currency', 'EMail', 'DateTime', 'Date', 'Time',

'Indicator', 'Format', 'Length', 'Width', 'Height', 'Weight', 'Level', 'Measure', 'Mode', 'Method', 'Numeric', 'Number',

'Price', 'State', 'Status', 'Rank', 'Flag', 'Frequency', 'Format', 'Size', 'Unit', 'Value', 'Version', 'Rate', 'Required',

'Percent', 'Quantity', 'Qty', 'Description', 'Comment', 'Reason', 'Location', 'Instructions', 'Text', 'Title', 'Type', 'Year',

'Month', 'Day', 'Name', 'URI', 'URL', or 'URN'; or that ends with 'Days', 'Hours', 'Minutes', 'ID', 'Id', 'Identification'

or 'Identifier'

• A domain may use specialized terms that are not shown here and

this can be configured accordingly.


Further NDR checks provided• The NDR rules also require that written definitions be provided for

items so any item with a missing annotation is flagged

• Spell checking of element and attribute names is supported by

providing an itemized list where the component name is broken out

into the specific words – e.g. PersonBirthDate – Person Birth Date

• An overall score is provided out of 10 maximum. Each rule

category item that fails from the basic NDR checks results in a 0.5

deduction. The resulting score is merely indicative rather than

definitive of the overall quality of the exchange structure.

Note: not all existing NIEM dictionary components are NIEM conformant and may fail the NDR checks


Content Type Consistency Checking• In addition to the NDR checks the template evaluator also

checks the consistency of the content restriction rules used.

• For items that use the reference terms date, time, number, value,

amount and so on in their names then the associated content

rule is compared

• Mismatched or missing rules are flagged – e.g. date as integer

• Items are named as specific content types such as Code or Type

that could be evaluated with a code list are flagged when no

associated code list is provided


Schema syntax specific checks• The use of certain W3C schema techniques are flagged where

these can cause behaviours that have know issues for consistent

information exchange design and interpretation

• xsd:any / xsd:anyAttribute – this allows a namespace to be created

and any components then inserted at this point in the structure

• xsd:nillable – interpretation and handling of empty elements varies

widely across XML parsers and platforms

• Interoperability concerns across systems include:

• xsd:maxOccurs with explicit number – limiting occurrences to a

specific value is not recommended

• Length restrictions on string elements

• In addition xsd:all is not supported

• The xsd:group is imported, but then refactored


More schema syntax considerations• The overall schema export process from a CAM template is

designed to simplify the schema generated and rely only on basic

constructs including complexType, simpleType and sequence

mechanisms for element and reference type linkage.

• The xsd:choice mechanism* is used along with basic type

definitions for date, string, integer, decimal, and float then

extended data types provided by xsd:datatype directly.

• Namespaces are supported and schema imports created for each

namespace declaration in the CAM template.

• Extended schema constructs such as xsd:substitutionGroup,

xsd:group, xsd:all, and so on are not utilized

* xsd:choice is permitted in NIEM NDR for extension schema, but not reference schema


Comparison to NIEM NDR evaluation• The NIEM NDR guidelines specify 150+ checks on various

aspects of schema syntax and usage.

• Using the CAM editor sidesteps these completely because the

schema syntax generated is simple, consistent and complete and

does not violate the 150+ items on the NIEM NDR checklist for

schema syntax constructs and usage.

• Simply put, any existing schema that can be ingested into a CAM

template and then exported out again in the simplified schema

syntax format will conform to the NIEM NDR.


PERCENTAGE REUSE SCORING

Dictionary comparison tool option


Compare to Dictionary processing• The Compare to Dictionary tool supports a special mode when

used with the NIEM-dictionary.xml file that ships in the program

installation folder dictionaries directory

• The NIEM-dictionary.xml file is a special file not to be confused

with the regular dictionaries used by CAM for drag-and-drop

designer collection purposes.

• In this mode the processing produces the special NIEM

wantlist.xml file for use with the NIEM SSGT and a cross-reference

spreadsheet of matched and unmatched items

• A HTML report is generated of the total percentage and number of

leaf element and attributes reused from the NIEM component set

• The Compare to Dictionary tool also works for any domain

dictionaries (non-NIEM), but the wantlist.xml is not created


TARGET SCHEMA GENERATION

Considerations for Schema export tools


Export Template to Schema• The Export Template to XSD schema supports several modes (that

are customizable through the XSLT provided)

• The NIEM modes are designed to create a matching set of

Exchange schema with Extension, Subset and External schema

imports

• Exported schema should always be checked with a schema

validating tool – complexities of namespace use and design

omissions may result in some schema syntax issues that need to

be manually addressed

• Additional tools are available for creating WSDL and JAXB

binding* components

• NIEM subset schema from the SSGT may be optionally manually

substituted for generated subset schema* Will be available in the CAM editor v2.2 release


SUMMARY AND REVIEW

Conclusion


Summary• The CAM template evaluation report supports a wide

range of quality control and interoperability checks• Specific NIEM NDR items reporting are focused on the

naming rules of the elements and attributes• Direct NIEM NDR schema checks are obviated by

generation of simple NIEM-conforming schema syntax• This export schema tool supports NIEM compatible

exchange, extension, subset schema collections• An additional dictionary reuse report, cross-reference

spreadsheet and scoring is available• These three tools greatly improve the ability of

information exchange designers to create NIEM-conforming information exchanges


Q & A

Resource Center link

http://www.oracle.com/goto/niem

CAMeditor download site:

http://www.cameditor.org

Documents

CAM editor NIEM Evaluation Report