notes from review of QR report

[Karsten Riemer <Karsten.Riemer@East.Sun.COM>]

Metamodel team met today:

Agenda:
Review report from QR on specification schema.

Present:
Jim Clark
Tim McGrath
Bill McCarthy
Sig Handelman
Scott Hinkelman
Jamie Clark
JJ Dubray
Karsten Riemer

We were lucky enough to have Tim dialing in from Australia to clarify QR
issues raised and to discuss a strategy for resolving them.

We have not heard from Executive Committee yet on whether they will release
version 0.87 for public review. The QR recommendation was not to unless issues
raised were addressed.

The report and executive's view of it is likely to be discussed in Steering
Committee meeting tomorrow. Karsten cannot attend (in-flight). We assume Paul
can attend and will represent Context/Metamodel groups perspective. 

There was agreement between Tim and the Context/Metamodel group (those
present) that the biggest issue in the report was the Multi-Party issue. Tim
was OK with our intent to treat Multi-Party in essence as a Package of
Two-Party collaborations for the infrastructure release, as long as the
document makes this clear, and that Multi-Party can be deferred to a next
release.

Tim also understood the dilemma between an accellerated infrastructure release
schedule and the subsequent release including core component content, with
respect to examples including actual core components or not. Sig Handelman
promised to ping Mary Kay and Lisa this week for lists of core components that
may be fully defined for us to use now. We also agreed to update text and
diagrams to show where core components will fit in when they exist.

We discussed structured document vs. non-structured. We agreed to more clearly
explain that structured means that the structure is defined in terms of ebXML
core components. We will try to find another term so as not to infer that for
instance an EDI document does not have structure. It is fully the intent that
one should be able to express a collaboration in terms of EDI document
exchanges.

We agreed to clarify that we use the word SCHEMA in its broadest sense, not
just XML schema. We agreed to make diagrams on page 3 and 4 more clear and to
make sure text and diagrams are 'isomorphic'.

We agreed that regardless of Executive Committee's decision we will start
editing the document for possible resubmission by end of this week. If version
0.87 actually is released for public review, we will just include these edits
in cycle 2 instead, they will not be wasted.

We solicit reviewers of this revision, to be published probably by end of
Wednesday. Please volunteer.

-karsten