Adding Foreign Namespace Support to the NITF XML Schema

As previously discussed on this blog, NITF has very limited support for foreign namespaces.  I've been experimenting with ways to remedy this and presented the results at the most recent face-to-face IPTC meeting (in Rome).  I have posted the NITF slides on slideshare.

During the meeting, it was decided to break the NITF 4.0 effort into two:

• NITF 3.6 release, which would directly address the addition of foreign namespaces and could be approved as early as January 2011
• NITF 4.0 which would add support for G2 features (such as qcodes) and will likely require significantly more work to develop and approve

It was decided to take this approach, since foreign namespace support addresses pressing needs (in fact, many people do not realize that it isn't legal already to mix and match NITF with other XML schema).  It was also felt that this change is relatively minor and so doesn't merit a major version number change (not sure I agree with that, but ...).

Therefore, I have now created an NITF 3.6 set of schema files, fixing various bugs in the previous experimental schema and adding expansion points that were missing.  So, compared with NITF 3.5, the experimental schema

• Added any attributes in globalNITFAttributes and commonNITFAttributes
• Added any element into head, body, docdata, body.head, block, enriched text, after body, media, body.end

I've also versioned the ruby files to 3.6 and altered the comments to discuss NITF 3.6, rather than NITF 3.5. Finally, I've created an NITF instance that exercises the various foreign namespace capabilities.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nitf/files/schema/nitf-3-6.xsd
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nitf/files/schema/nitf-3-6-ruby-include.xsd
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nitf/files/schema/nitfastronautNSspan.xml

These files are also available via the NITF 3.6 directory on the IPTC website.


Comments?  Questions?  Critiques?