Changes to the NIEM Technical Architecture from NIEM version 3.* to version 4.0.
Documents:
Changes
- Updated version from 3.0 to 4.0, affecting:
- Namespaces: structures, appinfo, NDR functions namespace
- Conformance target identifiers: REF, EXT
- Now pointing to GitHub repository (https://github.com/NIEM/NIEM-NDR/) for:
- Revisions/updates/errata: posted to the document repository
- Comments/issues: posted as GitHub issues
- Grammar, spelling, and narrative improvements
- Moved content of the Local Terminology namespace (
term) into the
Application Information namespace (appinfo)
- Explicitly allow structures namespace to be subset
- NDR Section 2.4.2 - Schematron updates
- Eliminated warning rules (
sch:report) that always fire
- Added attribute (
role="warning") to warning rules
- Broke apart overly-large rule on standard opening phrases into smaller rules
- NDR Section 12 - Linked data approach
- Added attribute
structures:uri
- Defined
structures:id and structures:ref in terms of structures:uri (Appendix B)
- Allow properties of objects to be distributed across multiple objects with
the same identifier
- Removed requirement that elements with
structures:ref have no properties
- Major rewrite to section 12.1, 12.2, addressing data’s meaning, identity, and references
- NDR Section 5 - RDF updates
- Simplified RDF representation
- RDF is much simpler than v3, with direct properties instead of reification
- Allows for more direct JSON representation via JSON-LD
- Removed RDF representation for metadata types
- NDR Section 6 & 8 - XML processing and defaults
- Improved discussion of infoset augmentation,
fixed, and default
- Allow use of fixed on attribute uses that are required in an instance
- NDR Section 10 & 11 - Naming
- Relaxed rules on component naming from MUST to SHOULD (USMTF)
- Allow all valid ASCII characters in component names
- Allowed: “A”-“Z”, “a”-“z”, “0”-“9”, “-“, “_”, “.”
- Codes
- Updated NIEM Code Lists Specification for v4
- Code lists may be managed via XML (Genericode) or spreadsheets/databases (CSV)
- Code lists may be versioned separately from XML Schema-based vocabularies
- Code lists may be identified at run time or at schema assembly time
- Allow for more complex use cases
- NDR Section 10 & 11: Allow code elements and code types to be represented by methods other than enumerations
- Described as correspondence to a list of conceptual entities
- Relaxed rules for structure/content of code elements and types
- Relaxed naming rules for code elements and types