Title: RE: [ubl-ndrsc] [Fwd: Fwd: ISO 3166-1 -- Change of Alpha-3 Code Element for Romania]
-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Gertner
[mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, February
13, 2002 7:55 AM
To: NDR SC
Subject: RE: [ubl-ndrsc] [Fwd:
Fwd: ISO 3166-1 -- Change of Alpha-3 Code Element for
Romania]
Are codelists part of
the data or part of the schema? This isn't as clearcut to me as you are
implying.
[CRAWFORD, Mark] It seems to me
they are only part of the schema if we need to enumerate UBL
unique code lists, or if for some reason we feel the need to
validate someone else's code list. Otherwise, why not leave it up to
the user to determine if the value of the data is
correct?
Another question:
don't these lists tend to have English language equivalents specified for all
values?
[CRAWFORD, Mark] most, but not all. Even
so, why do we want to go down this
rathole?
-----Original
Message-----
From: CRAWFORD,
Mark [mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, February 13,
2002 1:33
PM
To: 'Fabrice DESRE'; NDR SC
Subject: RE: [ubl-ndrsc] [Fwd: Fwd: ISO
3166-1 -- Change of Alpha-3 Code Element for
Romania]
IMHO we
are loosing sight of a very distinct difference between human
readability/semantic clarity of tags and human readability/semantic clarity of
data (codes). It's not our data that we want human readable! There
is no way that we can ensure or control semantic clarity of data, nor should
we entertain any thoughts of trying to do so.
A
tremendous amount of work has gone into establishing code lists to provide
tokens for data values that are clear, unambiguous, and easily mapped to any
language specific value of the code. Avoiding using those code lists for
data values and trying to establish English language equivalents just makes no
sense, is counterproductive, and does not justify the small processing time
savings for transformations from code to language equivalents.
Mark
