Dear all,

During the Edinburgh meeting we had problems defining the way we were going to communicate to develop a core of clases-ontology-list- whatever for TDWG.

While reading the OpenGIS Sensor Observation Service (SOS) Implementation Specification I have found that they seem to have the same problem of people very used to XML Spy and its XML Schema representation for modeling. They enforce the use of UML diagrams but use XML Spy diagrams for clarification.

"5.2 UML Notation Most diagrams that appear in this specification are presented using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) static structure diagram, as described in Subclause 5.2 of [OGC 05- 008]. 5.3 XML schema notation Most diagrams that appear in this specification are presented using an XML schema notation defined by the XMLSpy1 product and described in this subclause. XML schema diagrams are for informative use only though they shall reflect the accompanied UML and schema perfectly. "

And then continue explaining the different things that appear on an XML Spy diagram (elements, optionality, recursion, sequence, choices, etc.)

I am sending this to the TAPIR mailing list because I think this could be really useful for the specification document. We can just point to them and we don't need to describe all this :)

The document I am talking about can be found at:

http://www.opengeospatial.org/specs/?page=requests&request=rfpc32

And is in its RPC process right now.

Javier.