Re: [xml-dev] Namespaces enable recognition of the type of document, but

[bryan rasmussen <rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com>]

> QUESTIONS
>
> 1. Is it best practice to include an enterprise-wide identifier in each business document?


 what happens if the identifier can't be dereferenced?



> 2. Is it best practice to use namespaces to identify the type of an XML document,
I believe it is best practice to use the concatenation of the
namespace and the document element - but it is not universal alas.
>and an enterprise-wide identifier to identify the instance?
I think most people, looking at the example you give, would say that
best practice is instead to explicitly markup all the branching in the
message sourcing, so that instead of having a unique id you would have
an element that specifies that this claim is made by the doctor, and
this one by the patient and so on and so forth.

>
> 3. Is there a standard for creating enterprise-wide identifiers?

URIs?


> 4. Is there a standard way of expressing enterprise-wide identifiers in an XML document?
>
>   - above I used a very simple <id>...</id> element

> 5. Is the requirement for an enterprise-wide identifier something that you would put in a business requirement's document, or is it something that a system implementer adds on his own initiative?

business requirement if the use is to make your data format
interoperable with some other technology- for example we want every
claim to be accessible via the browser then we say that every claim
has a http address and its address is included in the id element in
the document.

system implementor if the business requirement says something like:

the system must be able to prevent multiple instances of the same
claim from being processed.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen