I am involved in some work that requires extensibility across a range of semantic elements, implemented through abstract types which appear as components in a number of information models, and specific instances that are derived from them. This allows conforming extensions to be created by others by extending the abstract types. These schemas are largely developed. Actual implementations, though, should not rely on extensions and substitution groups. WS-Interoperability is likely to be required—and it forbids the use of these in schemas (as I understand it). When we get past the joy of abstract models interacting with valid extensions to actual applications that either know what to do with an xml artifact or they don’t, one must pick and choose, and send messages that will be understood at the other end. Is there a standard approach or set of tools for generating and or validating these restricted or profiled schemas? In a perfect world, an artifact validated from the full schema but matching the profiled business rules would be indistinguishable from another artifact representing the same information validated by the profiled, non-extensible schema. The full information models are large enough, because they need to be, that manual generation and validation of the profiled schemas is, well, daunting. Thanks tc “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
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