A framework for XML schema naming and design rules development tools

Manufacturing industry is facing an enormous challenge today in trying to integrate a wide range of software systems. These systems span the functional areas of manufacturing, as well as, the multitude of organizations and countries involved in the manufacture of their products. To address these needs (and similar needs in other industries) a number of organizations are defining standards that support the integration of the systems. Many of these standards are an application of the XML family of software standards. To ensure quality in the emerging domain standards, the organizations producing them also define guidelines for how the XML standards, especially XML Schema, will be used in a given context. These guidelines are published as sets of Naming and Design Rules (NDR). Unfortunately, a single set of these rules do not meet the needs of the wide range of standards being developed. Moreover, the guidelines are being published as prose (e.g., English text) rather than in a computational form. To address these shortcomings and allow for the more rapid creation of high quality NDR, NIST is developing a set of tools to facilitate Naming and Design Rules Development. The tools support the development of executable tests to support NDR, collaboration on the use of those tests, the grouping of tests into testing profiles, as well as, the association of NDR documentation with executable tests. The grouping mechanism allows rules to be selected from a larger set for use in a particular context. By also providing for the association of guidelines with executable tests, a testing suite can be quickly assembled. Furthermore, the pool of guidelines and their tests can be collaboratively developed, thereby leveraging resources and creating higher quality test sets in the end. The report describes a roadmap for the use of these tools in the development of XML Schema Naming and Design Rules. It is produced by the XML Testbed project within the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division at NIST. These tools aid in producing high quality XML schemas using a standards-based approach to manufacturing systems integration. The tools are based on open-standards, making them highly configurable and reusable. The three primary functional areas of the tools described are authoring, testing, and sharing.