[New-ITS] XMI

[Grahame Grieve]

I have been looking at the XMI serialisation.
We could use it in the UML ITS, as the way that
we specify how the XML reflects the UML diagrams.

It has many strengths:

1. it's a standard (OMG no less), so tooling would exist
2. it allows you to do schemas (by all styles) and it lets you
    do DTDs (our current approach and the one I was going to
    propose do not allow anything but venetion blind schemas)
3. it is very name centric
4. it's very solid and proven
5. it has inbuilt support for id/idref resting on good standards
     under good control from the diagrams.
6. it allows all sorts of clever things like delta updates.

it has some very strong weaknesses:

1. it allows all sorts of clever things like delta updates.
2. it is far more verbose than what I was going to propose or
    even the existing XML ITS (though the structural advantages
    we are pursuing will still exist)
3. it handles polymorphism very badly. say you use a CD or a
    CE in Observation.value. the path for the code will be
      value/CD/code
      value/CE/code
    respectively


btw, it doesn't rule about elements vs attributes. We still
get to choose about that ;-)

I note it provides an ITS level wrapper. This is a concept that
I am considering creating for other reasons anyway, some of them
the same as the reason XMI has it.

does anyone have any experience or any comments with the XMI
serialisation?

Grahame