Editorial: Blog Focus Change

Very briefly, and to provide fair warning to readers, the focus of this blog will begin changing in the upcoming months. The necessity to BUILD NIEM exchanges continues to be alive and well, however this need is being well served by a number of resources already. Instead, this blog will begin to focus on IMPLEMENTING NIEM exchanges through modern technologies and programming languages. For example, the first article you will see shortly focuses on using jQuery to parse an access NIEM-conformant data. If you have any suggestions or concerns, feel free to post them as comments here.

As a side note, and in the interest of full-disclosure, the author of this Blog, Joel Byford, has recently begun working at Microsoft Corporation as a part of their Public Sector consulting arm. He continues to be involved in national committees an standard-setting for information sharing, and is very excited to be working for such a prominent organization helping improve information sharing between public sector organizations.

Thank you so much for your ongoing readership and support!

Editorial: Growing Support for Asynchronous Transactions

It's always exciting to see a prediction come true. . .especially when its one of your own.  For a number of years now it has been obvious that the simple synchronous web services taught in books and college courses were never going to be sufficient enough to support the highly complex transactions required in the real world.  In particular, transactions which require two-phase validation, such as those that leverage Schematron in addition to simple XML Schema validation.

It appears that others are leaning towards agreeing with this same premise.  Microsoft is now publishing its Visual Studio Async in order to better handle these sorts of highly complex transactions which require higher network latency than your traditional synchronous request/response web service.  Infoworld has a good article here that describes Microsoft's adoption of this new trend.

While not endorsing any specific platform, Microsoft's development tools have historically been a great indicator of market trends.  This latest addition proves to be a good sign that the industry is headed towards better support of this highly complex transaction processing world in which we live.

Link: Schematron Tutorials

There are a number of solid Schematron tutorials posted on the internet.  Two of most comprehensive ones available are:

• The Oasis-Hosted Coverpages.com Schematron Article.
• Roger Costello’s Tutorial 

We won’t plagiarize their incredible wealth of Schematron material here, so it is highly recommend developers jump to and use these online tutorials.

Schematron: Recommended Reading

What books exists out there that detail Schematron and how to use it?

Best one I've seen to date is "Schematron" from O'Reilly Media available in electronic (Adobe PDF) format for $9.99 USD. Provides a great overview and set of examples using Schematron, albeit exclusively in hierarchically linked XML documents. It does assume the reader already has a strong understanding of XML and XSLT. If you are a bit rusty on XSLT or XQuery, you'll want to pick up a book on that as well.

Welcome!

Welcome to the initial post of the NIEM-Schematron (aka NIEMatron) community. At the 2009 NIEM National Training Event (see #NIEMNTE on Twitter) it became apparent that the next big task for NIEM was ensuring that data was self-describing. As it currently stands today, the XML Schema Documents (XSD) used can only enforce and describe a small portion of the data in each Information Exchange Package Document (IEPD) developed. Expressing complex business rules has and continues to be a large struggle for many implementers of the NIEM standard. Most implementers have chosen to use validation logic built using whatever programming language fits their need (e.g. Java, VB.net, C++, C#, etc.) however once this is done, there is very little that one of their information exchange partners can use if the partner leverages a different technology or programming language. This problem is one of the key reasons the XML community developed the ISO standard Schematron. Schematron is a simple XML/XSLT-based script that allows implementers to describe highly complex business rules that would otherwise be impossible to describe using XSD alone. This website and blog will be updated on a regular basis to provide NIEM practitioners a place to learn about, ask questions, and discuss Schematron. We will attempt to provide as much information to NIEM developers as possible about tricks and traps we've encountered while using this powerful scripting language and will also be providing further executive-level explanations surrounding the technology and the value proposition it brings. Please be patient as like many of you, we travel quite often and may have difficulty responding immediately to questions you pose. Please follow us on Twitter (user: NIEMatron) if you would like to be appraised of new messages as they are posted. Thanks, and welcome to the future!