Grandpa Ham - Grandpa Can do IT!

I am now committed to the Virginia DMV through June. Good folks. Good work. More importantly, a real saving of taxpayer money. It is amazing what can be achieved when a group of dedicated people actually follow a defined, clear process for planning the future.

The project I am working on for the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles has put up a web site. Click here to see to see what it is all about. I have also added the link to my “Partner Links” in the menu.

The new OASIS Emergency Management Resource Message is about to be released for Public Comment.  I will link it here just as soon as it is available.  It has been a lot of work, but is finally in very good form.  Schemas, message examples, and complete specification document will soon be available.

We figured it out at the Emergency Management Technical Committee Messaging subcommittee meeting yesterday.   There was an error in the CIQ schema.  We have submitted a fix to the the OASIS CIQ committee chairman.  All is good. Our Resource Messaging schemas work. Yea!!!

Folks,

The following is a geek post on XML Schema, Customer Information Quality (CIQ), and Microsoft Visual Studio. I am blogging it here so I can easily refer to it in e-mails or future posts.

I am trying to convert some Resource Messaging examples to CIQ 3.0 for our Resource Messaging Specification. It was working well. I figured out most of the differences and was making some progress when I suddenly got unexpected “Object Reference not set to an instance of an object” and Unhandled “System.NullReferenceException in XML Editor” errors in MS Studio 2005.

It occurred when changing element names from xal:Name to xal:NameElement for either xalAdministrativeArea or xal:Locality.
Interestingly, it does not happen when changing xal:Name to xal:NameElement for xal:Country.

Weird??

Not trusting the expensive Microsoft product, I returned to my free-ware X-Ray from Architag International. It detected what it believes to be an error in the xAL schema. The following is the text of the error message:

Invalid content type by extension, extension is not allowed by Base Type: ‘{urn:oasis:name:ciq:xal:3 }NameType’ Derived Type.

Schema Error Location /schema{1}/complexType[position()=1 @name= ‘AddressType’]/sequence[1]/element[position() = 4 @name = “Locality”/complexType[1]/sequence[1]/element[position0 = 1 @name = [‘NameElement’]/complexType[1]/complexContent[1]/extension[1]

Perhaps that is why Visual studio is choking. It is certainly in the same place (xal:Locality NameElement).

Question: Can anyone verify the authenticity of the error?

Spent the morning today reviewing the OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ) specification. Good work. CIQ is set of XML Schemas designed manage names, addresses, and locations related to organizations and individuals across the globe or in your back yard. For CIQ, at least, “flexible structure” is not an oxymoron. I am researching this for the OASIS Emergency management Technical Committee, but it has implications for the Virginia DMV as well. A basic structure for accessing the “360 view.” Good stuff. Here is the link to the OASIS download page.

Back to schema work for Christmas holiday.  Doing the formal schema to be part of the Emergency Management Technical Committee draft Resource Messaging Standard.

The DMV work continues to go well. It is truly a joy to work with the team that they have assembled for BPR activities. These folks are the cream of the crop. This is one project where the taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. For the vendors out there who might be reading this: These folks know what they are doing. You are advised to work with them honestly, directly, as true collaborative partners. This will not be a “pull the wool over their eyes” procurement. Be prepared to work with them and you will do well. Try the stereotypical contractor shenanigans and you will have no end of difficulty.  To paraphrase the old Oldsmobile commercial, this is not your father’s DMV!

A Reminder for our Committee and other SDO’s of all Kinds (with apologies to Ogden Nash)

OASIS creates
Standards of choice.
Standards design
Where we have a voice.

PLEASE keep it simple
For programmer use.
Complication’s no more
Than programmer abuse.

Too much hoo hah
And talk of what’s “critical”
Sounds to most programmers
Like BS political.

How do we build it?
We just want to know.
Make it seem easy.
Adoption will grow.

Use some big words
To describe simple things,
And watch us ignore you.
You won’t even get pings.

If we don’t understand
We will not comply,
And use of your standards
Will shrivel and die.

So, do not confuse us.
Be explicit, direct,
Or your “stuff” and ours
Will not intersect.

We’ll just ignore you
And be on our way.
We will build what WE need
And YOU can “have a nice day.”

I am now set up to put out the news in blog format. It was deceivingly simple, but full of glitches, too. I had planned to convert my original pages to blog pages as well. I may still do so, but there are formatting issues that are related to going from one CSS style to another, or even from one blog style to another. Once I finally decide on a good looking blog style, I may convert the rest of my site. For now, however, I will tolerate the two differing styles; one for the fixed site and one for the more dynamic interactive blog site. It is likely that the format for the blog side will change as I experiment with different templates. Lots of fun :-).