Re: [obix] Fear and Trembling and Contracts and Joy

This is analogous to saying (I think) that a particular contract MAY
    have a business context and rules that are out of scope for obix.
    The real issue is whether undefined things are carried along with
    obix objects (IMO not a good idea) or correlated in other ways
    (typical practice - e.g. a lookup table based on a contract ID).

    

    There are many ways of doing that, so I think a simple note saying
    the above is sufficient.

    

    Thanks!

    

    bill

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William Cox
      

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On 12/16/13 12:59 PM, Gemmill, Craig
      wrote:

    

    
      
      
      
      
      

        
Another thing
            about contracts is they may also have an implicit portion
            not captured in the explicit schema (“if you do this, the
            object implementing the contract must do that”).  Although
            this could possibly be expressed in some sort of textual
            description element.

        
 

        

          

            
From:
                
                [mailto:]
                On Behalf Of Markus Jung

                Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2013 10:33 AM

                To: 

                Subject: Re: [obix] Fear and Trembling and
                Contracts and Joy

          

        

        
 

        
This process
          sound quite good, covering extension to the contract library
          with committee notes.

          

          Only one minor thing, it will not be possible to use XML
          schema files to describe contracts. Since contracts are
          defined by example (templates) as regular OBIX objects, which
          mean that these files will be standard XML files adhering to
          the XML core schema.

          

          Bests,

          Markus

        

          
Am 12.12.2013 23:28, schrieb Toby
            Considine:

        

        
          
I was both happy and wary after today’s
            meeting on contracts. An agreement to have OASIS host a set
            of standard contract libraries was a wonderful thing. The
            suggestion that we might get them from a variety of new
            sources was interesting. The prospect of voting on standard
            contracts for the next 5 years was daunting, to say the
            least.

          
 

          
I just got off the phone with Chet
            Ensign, the head of managing the TC process for OASIS, and
            he suggested a path that reduced my wariness. If it meets
            the needs of the TC, we can proceed. First, some background.
            Last spring/summer, the process of creating committee notes
            was much streamlined. A committee note can be finished by
            means of a simple majority vote of the committee. Public
            review and multi-stage processes are no longer required.
            (This means that the Committee Note on backwards
            compatibility proposed by Bill to deal with 1.0 issues is
            simpler, too.)

          
 

          
Chet suggested a way to handle machine
            readable artifacts using the committee notes process. We
            write a note “Using Standard Contracts with OBIX”. The
            committee note discusses standard contracts for OBIX
            (“Standard Contracts are like Mom and Apple Pie. You like
            them. Mom likes watching you consume them!” It then has a
            section on each set of standard contracts submitted, that
            references a particular artifact. All contract artifacts are
            kept in a particular directory under the OBIX. For example,
            here is the permanent repository for Energy Interop. OBIX
            does not yet use this format because 1.0 was from before the
            current process was developed.

          
http://docs.oasis-open.org/energyinterop/ei/v1.0/

          
So, for sake of discussion, say we have a
            contracts library. We vote, simple majority, to approve the
            Committee Note and the artifact gets added to the Contract
            Library. Sometime later, we get another submission. We talk
            about it, maybe tweak it, expand the committee note, and
            vote for a rev 2 of the Committee Note.

          
 

          
The contract library, then, is full of
            contracts. Perhaps we decide they are implemented as XSDs
            within the OBIX Namespace. Perhaps we annotate them with
            comments at the top of the artifact. Lets assume that’s what
            we do, and move on.

          
 

          
STDLIB.OBIX would them morph into
            obix-stdlib-201312.xsd. A new European library of Energy
            Contracts would morph into obix-euroenergy-201403.xsd. We
            can come up with some sort of artifact naming scheme that
            supports versioning and keep all artifacts in the contract
            library indefinitely. We can imagine a library
            bacnet-201406.xsd just as easily. Silos could arrive as
            medequip-201409.xsd

          
 

          
So that’s enough to start the
            conversation.

          
 

          
Discuss…

          
 

          
tc

          
 

          

            

                
              

          

          
"Energy
              and persistence conquer all things." -- Benjamin Franklin
            

          

            

              

                

                  

                    

                      

                        

                          

                            

                              

                                
                              

                            

                          

                        

                      

                    

                  

                

              

            

          

          
            
              

                
                  
Toby Considine

                      TC9, Inc

                  
OASIS TC Chair: oBIX &
                    WS-Calendar

                  
OASIS TC Editor: EMIX, Energy
                    Interoperation

                  
SGIP
                    Smart Grid Architecture Committee

                
                
                  
  

                
                
                  
Email: 
                      

                    Phone: (919)619-2104

                  
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