Meeting Report

National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS)

L8, Data Representation, Special Interest Group Meetings

April 8 & 9, 1999 at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD

Attendees:

Bruce Bargmeyer Environmental Protection Agency

Jim Carpenter Bureau of Labor Statistics

Joe Christensen Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Eliot Christian United States Geological Survey

Tom Culpepper 3M

Tommie Curtis System Development Center

Larry Fitzwater Environmental Protection Agency

Sheila Frank Health Care Finance Administration

Dan Gillman Bureau of the Census

Beverly Hacker Environmental Protection Agency

Henry Heffernan EDPNS

Judy Griffin HAZMED

Michael Huhns University of South Carolina

William H Kenworthey, Jr. Self

Fritz Lehmann Cycorp

Judith Newton National Institute of Standards and Technology

Douglas Mann Battelle

John McCarthy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Matthew Morgenstern Cornell University

Frank Olken Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Ky Ostergaard Science Applications International Corporation

Genevieve Speier Health Care Finance Administration

Linda Spencer Environmental Protection Agency

Judith Newton chaired the full SIG meeting, held at the start of the first day. Project leaders chaired the meeting for each project.

A teleconference bridge was available each of the meeting days for national and international dial-in calls. Teleconference numbers were sent out before the meetings and videoconference arrangements were made. The teleconference phone was defective and was replaced during the first morning. The videoconference capability worked fine, given considerable technical assistance before the meeting started. All persons, from any country, who are interested in the projects, are invited to call during the meetings. Anyone from outside the US, who wants to call in, should send a message to Judith Newton (jnewton@nist.gov) or call her at +1 301 975 3256 so that any special arrangements can be made.

Full SIG meeting:

1. Name of Committee

In discussions prior to the merger of L8 and T2, people noted a need revise both the name and scope of L8. Dan Gillman proposed changing the name of L8 from "Data Representation" to "Metadata". We had a straw vote and unanimously agreed to recommend this change to the L8 Plenary. We agreed that we should change the scope as well. Doug Mann will prepare a draft version of a new scope, based on the SC 32/WG 2 scope. He will send it out on the L8 reflector for comment. We will discuss it at the next meeting.

2. Open Forum on ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registries

The next Open Forum on ISO/IEC Metadata Registries will be held during the week of January 11, 2000 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. EPA has obtained the services of a contractor, the Marasco Newton Group, to help organize the Open Forum, SC 32 and SC 32/WG 2 meetings, which will be held at the same place during January, 2000. An initial meeting will be held with the contractor on next Wednesday. Then the contractor will work with persons organizing the Open Forum and other meetings. A request was made for volunteers to help plan the agenda and prepare the documents for the Open Forum. The next Open Forum will focus on ISO/IEC 11179 as before, but will also include implementation tracks. The proposed schedule includes:

Day 1, Optional tutorials--beginner and advanced

Day 2, Implementations

Day 3, Terminology

Days 4 & 5, Tracks:

Healthcare

Environment (especially hazardous waste cleanup)

Statistics (especially census)

Electronic Commerce/Electronic Data Interchange

Terminology

If you are interested in helping to organize the Open Forum, please contact Bruce Bargmeyer at bargmeyer.bruce@epa.gov

3. Preparations for WG 2 meetings in Matsue, Japan

Each of the projects is requested to make available the key documents about the project as far in advance of the Matsue meeting as possible. Each project is to create one or more new/revised documents for review at Matsue. The work is expected to continue, but international members of WG 2 need to be able to review documents in advance. The person creating the document is to put it on the project website and announce that it is available by sending a message to the SC 32/WG 2 informal email reflector: sc32wg2-news@nist.gov

To retrieve the documents, see the project reports, below, for the URL to each project website.

It is desired to do as much of the work by email as possible. The reflector addresses are as follows:

Object Specification 11179-objectspecification@nist.gov

11179-3 Revision 11179-part3@nist.gov

Registry Content 11179-registrycontent@nist.gov

Terminology 11179-terms@nist.gov

XML 11179-xml@nist.gov

To see if you are on any of the above lists, see: http://www.sdct.itl.nist.gov/~ftp/l8/maillist.txt

Note that to keep duplicate entry of names to a minimum, some lists refer to other lists, so you need to follow all references to see if you are on the list. E.g., the sc32wg2-news@nist.gov list sends the message to everyone on the l8-news@nist.gov list.

See the project meeting notes, below for links to the project sites where documents to be discussed in Matsue are being made available.

4. Project meetings

The rest of the two days were spent on project meetings. The projects are part of an SC 32/WG 2 study period, which is preliminary to development of proposals for New Work Items that revise and extend ISO/IEC 11179. The projects relate to metadata registration and the functions of metadata registries. The full group met for each project meeting (not concurrent meetings as in some previous meetings).

There is a web accessible directory for each of the projects. Documents related to each project are being placed in the project directories. You can access all of the directories at

< ww.nist.gov/L8/sc32wg2/projects>.

Some of the projects have home pages that list or describe documents on the project website. See below for project level URLs.

Projects are requested to maintain the relevant documents on their project website. See each website for the reports and other project documents. The following lists each project and the URL for the project.

If you have comments on any of the documents, please send the comments to the email reflector for the project. See above for a list of email reflectors.

4.1 Revise ISO/IEC 11179, Part 3 (five-year revision) with amendments to other parts of 11179 to make all parts consistent [Joe Christensen, Australia, editor]

Joe Christensen led the discussion while he was on the phone, Doug Mann led the discussion of the metamodel during the afternoon of the second day.

This is already an approved SC 32 project. The objective is to update ISO/IEC 11179, Specification and Standardization of Data Elements, Part 3, Basic Attributes. This work is the result of the 5-year review of Part 3. This project will also develop corrigenda or changes in the other parts of ISO/IEC 11179 to make the separately developed parts consistent between themselves and to make them consistent with the revised Part 3.

On the first day, we had a teleconference with Joe Christensen. The teleconferences began at 8:15 AM, before the regular meeting, since Joe is 16 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. Joe is working on revisions of ISO/IEC 11179 Part 3. We also met the afternoon of the second day to review the metamodel and to decide upon proposed changes. Doug Mann presented the metamodel and led the discussion of changes.

We discussed the inclusion of XML in Part 3. See the XML project report, below.

We discussed the latest draft of Part 3. We have removed some annexes, which will be included in the Content report. Joe will delete these and make other changes to produce a new version. He will put the revised version on the project website and Joe will send a message to the SC32WG2-News@nist.gov email reflector announcing its availability.

Doug Mann led a discussion of the UML metamodel. He reviewed changes made per agreements at the last meeting. We walked through the classification area of the metamodel and found a way to reduce then number of administrative attributes to record for the content of classification schemes. Doug will prepare a new version, reflecting this change. He will send out a notice to SC32/WG2 stating how to access the new version.

Interest was expressed in holding the whole of the next SIG meeting on the metamodel. We need to finalize any revisions. Unless there is objection, we will reduce the other project meetings to a bare minimum next time and will allocate almost all of the time to the UML model in Part 3. We will get as much input during the Matsue meeting as possible and include these comments in our work.

Documents about this project can be found at two sites. The WG 2 - Metadata website is:

http://metadata.aihw.gov.au/

A copy of the most recent draft is also available at:

http://sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov/~ftp/l8/sc32wg2/projects/11179p3r/

4.2 Object Specifications for ISO/IEC 11179

We discussed scope and packaging of this New Work Item. We will try to progress it as a separate NWI. Dan Gillman will present this at Matsue. Tom Culpepper will prepare a draft of the standard and will review the NWI that was previously developed.

Tom will also work with Dan in preparation for the Matsue meeting, this may include some power point presentation and some strategy.

Tom would like to rename this to Metadata Query Service (MQS) for ISO/IEC 11179 .

IDL for the Stewardship region has been completed and is in review. Tom will place this on the ftp site as soon as he makes a few changes.

The report of previous meetings and related documents are available at:

http://sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov/~ftp/l8/sc32wg2/projects/11179obj/

4.3 XML extensions for ISO/IEC 11179

The project group met via videoconference. This project involves development of a set of XML metadata tags for accessing 11179 metadata registry content and for import/export of registry content. This would make ISO/IEC 11179 useful in the new XML enabled web technologies. Collaborative efforts with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have shifted from the Resource Description Framework working group to the XML-schema working group within the W3C.

Frank Olken and John McCarthy, the project leaders, described progress in the W3C work. Frank and John worked with other members of the XML-Schema Working Group to propose standards for representing datatypes in XML and worked through ISO to make it possible to include ISO 11404 language independent datatypes (i.e., vendor independent). Although the schema and datatype specifications were not in the original XML proposals, the major players--Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. -- are now fully engaged in adding these specifications, so that the work for the SC 32/WG 2 project is to make sure the specifications are adequate to support metadata registries. Work on the XML-Schema committee also helps influence participants from major database management software vendors (including Oracle, Sybase, IBM and Microsoft), whose products are may be used for creating and accessing metadata registries. The XML-Schema Working Group hopes to release a first public draft by May, and to complete a Proposed Recommendation for W3C approval by the end of 1999.

The SC 32/WG 2 XML activities have led to two sets of important contacts: the Electronic Commerce and Object Management communities. In January, 1999 Bruce Bargmeyer and John McCarthy made a web seminar presentation on metadata registries and related topics to the eCo Framework Working Group, a CommerceNet activity. L8 members also are working with developers of XMI (from Unisys and IBM) to use software tools they have developed to automatically translate the Universal Modeling Language (UML) version of the metadata registry standard into XMI -- an XML representation of UML, which is becoming a new standard for interchanging information between different CASE and data modeling tools. Using XML and XMI will facilitate such information flows in the future.

Frank and John have been working during the past year to develop prototype demonstrations of how XML can be used integrate data exchange and metadata access. They have already developed an initial demonstration that retrieves selected data from the a database and encapsulates it in XML tags, using a skeletal XML Document Type Definition (DTD). Once the data elements are included in a metadata registry, Frank and John will extend this initial capability for web users to select data elements and create self-describing XML datasets. These XML files will include selected database data along with corresponding metadata (in a 11179 metadata registry) that pertain to those particular data elements -- and/or XML links back to more extensive metadata in the metadata registry. Plans are underway to demonstrate this capability during meetings in September, 1999 and at the SC 32/WG 2 Open Forum on Metadata Registries to be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA during January 2000.

Project participants agreed that the XML work is an automatic transformation of the UML model to form the XML tags. During the project meeting in March, we agreed to include the ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry tags as an annex to Part 3, with the agreement of Joe Christensen, editor of the Part 3 revision. At this meeting, we had considerable discussion of whether or not to make the Annex normative. There is some doubt about whether or not the W3C XML-Schema recommendation and the OMG XMI conversion will be stable enough to support a normative version. This remains an open topic.

Documents about this project, including the documents resulting from the topics discussed at this meeting are available at:

http://sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov/~ftp/l8/sc32wg2/projects/11179xml/

4.4 Technical Report on ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registry Content

This project group met most of the day, April 8, 1999. The exchange of metadata between ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registries depends not only on registry software that conforms to the standard, but also on metadata contents that are compatible between registries. While the 11179 standard has general coverage for data element specification and registration, there are pragmatic issues pertaining to populating the registries with content. Based on the experiences of organizations that are implementing the standard, a technical report to explore content issues could help current and future users. This could also possibly be an implementation guide.

Judith Newton presented a revised draft of the document including material from Lois Fritts. Lois was on vacation, but revisions to her material were presented by Tommie Curtis. Given comments, Lois will make some revisions. In Matsue, Lois will lead the discussion on this part of the document. Judith Newton will make revisions and will lead the discussion of this material at Matsue. Lois and Judith will make their revised drafts available on the project web site and will send an announcement to the SC32WG2-News reflector.

Documents about this project, including the documents resulting from the topics discussed at this meeting are available at:

http://sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov/~ftp/l8/sc32wg2/projects/11179content/content-home.htm

4.7 Terminology extensions for ISO/IEC 11179

This group met briefly. This work focuses on extending the 11179 to better accommodate semantic management of concepts and the terms by which concepts are referenced. Extensions to 11179 are required to establish a means for specifying concepts and terms and to establish a means for organizing concepts/terminology into structured sets. Reference implementations will be used to demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed standards and technology. Jim Carpenter provided a revised draft document. We reviewed assignments and people will try to get their material to Jim. Jim will make a new version and announce its availability on the SC32WG2-News reflector. Ky Ostergaard is working with Bruce Bargmeyer to prepare a revised version of the terminology framework. A new version will be put on the project website and an announcement will be sent out when it is available.

Documents about this project are available at:

http://sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov/~ftp/l8/sc32wg2/projects/11179term/term-home.htm

5. Future meeting schedule

Note that national and international participation is invited for these project meetings. A teleconference bridge is in place for all meetings. Anyone interested in participating is invited to call in. There is also a message number to dial, in case there is a problem with the conference telephone. We can also dial out to international numbers if this helps people to participate. All times below are Eastern Daylight Time.

5/21-28/98, Matsue Japan, SC 32 and SC 32/WG 2 meetings.

Here are the rooms reserved for the rest of 1999 for L8 related meetings at NIST.

Meetings begin at 9 AM and end at 5 PM, except for meetings during which we call Australia. Those meetings start at 8:15 to somewhat accommodate the time difference. The room times below are for room reservation purposes.

** This room is located in the NIST North Bldg.

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Directions to NIST Administration Building: From Interstate 270, driving North, take Exit 10. The exit takes you under the freeway. Take a left into the NIST campus at the first stoplight. The Administration Building is the largest building on the campus. Visitor parking is in the large parking lot in front of the Admin Building. Other parking lots nearby are reserved for permit holders.

Directions to NIST North: NIST North is Building 820. The address of this building is 820 West Diamond Avenue. Note that the building is located across the street from the main campus of NIST. Instead of turning onto Bureau Drive toward the main Gate of NIST, turn the opposite direction (North) onto Bureau Drive and take the second possible right turn to get to the NIST North building, The building has the name "NIST" on it in large letters. (From Interstate 270, driving North, take Exit 10, which loops under the freeway, and then turn RIGHT at the first stop light--this is the intersection of West Diamond Avenue and Bureau drive.)

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NCITS L8 documents, including this meeting report, are available via Anonymous FTP from sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov. Change directory to l8 (L8 in lowercase letters) and check the "readme" file for details. The FTP site is also available on the web at: http://sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov/~ftp/l8 Many of the documents are also listed on the L8 Home Page. The URL is http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/X3L8". If you have questions or comments on this document send email to bargmeyer.bruce@epamail.epa.gov