S1000D Business Rules

Having been involved in the exchange and use of digital publications in the aerospace industry during the last ten years, I realize the importance of specifying well defined business rules and most importantly validating the XML documents against those business rules.

The S1000D TPSMG is currently reviewing two Change Proposal Forms (CPFs) that will help S1000D implementers in the area of business rules:

• CPF-2007-048DE: Business Rules (BR) Categories and Layers
• CPF-2006-033CA: Schematron for Business Rules

CPF-2007-048DE (written by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels and Mike Day) has proposed the breakdown of business rules into 10 categories as follows:

1. General business rules
2. Product definition business rules
3. Maintenance philosophy and concepts of operations business rules
4. Security business rules
5. Business process business rules
6. Data creation business rules
7. Data exchange business rules
8. Data integrity and management business rules
9. Legacy data conversion, management, and handling business rules
10. Data output business rules

CPF-2007-048DE also proposed the layering of S1000D business rules and will help implementers in creating a comprehensive and well organized set of business rules for their projects.

The second CPF, CPF-2006-033CA (proposed by myself and accepted for inclusion in S1000D 3.x) suggested ISO Schematron as the mechanism for exchanging and validating S1000D documents against business rules. While ISO Schematron cannot validate all S1000D project specific business rules (e.g. verifying that a paragraph is written according to the rules of Simplified English), it can certainly do an excellent job at providing very valuable reports and diagnostics information about the content of an XML document.

ISO Schematron declares assertions about arbitrary patterns in XML documents and then reports on the presence or absence of these patterns. Schematron schemas use XPath for specifying the node that is the subject of the assertion and for testing the assertion itself.

Very complex assertions can be expressed by using new XPath 2.0 constructs such as regular expressions, conditional expressions, sequence expressions, type expressions, and the extensive function library.

Today, the combined validation power of XML Schema and ISO Schematron and the query and data manipulation capabilities of XQuery have made the maxim "The document is the database" a reality.