Spatineo Blog and Knowledge Base OGC to switch to WC3 XLink in July 2012

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) will make a backwards incompatible change to it’s XML Schema files of a large part of it’s standards in July 21st 2012. This change is done as a global corrigendum to move into using the W3C XLink version 1.1 instead of the OGC-specific XLink XML Schema implementation. See my previous post at for details on the reasons behind this pretty large-scale change.

Basically the change is quite a simple one:

  • all existing OGC standards that reference the OGC XLink shall be updated to reference the W3C XLink 1.1 schema and
  • going forward any new standards work shall only reference the W3C XLink schema.

By far the most used XLink attribute in OGC schemas is the locator attribute xlink:href, which contains an URL pointing to a link between two XML documents. In the XML Schema documents, the XLink href attribute is usually included in a complex type by adding an attribute group named simpleLink. In schemas using GML this is often done indirectly by using a pre-defined gml:AssociationAttributeGroup:

<complexType name="ReferenceType">
  <annotation>
    <documentation>
    gml:ReferenceType is intended to be used in application schemas directly,
    if a property element shall use a "by-reference only" encoding.
    </documentation>
  </annotation>
  <sequence/>
  <attributeGroup ref="gml:OwnershipAttributeGroup"/>
  <attributeGroup ref="gml:AssociationAttributeGroup"/>
</complexType>

The gml:AssociationAttributeGroup GML 3.2.1 (before the XLink corrigendum) in turn refers to the simpleLink attribute group defined in the XLink namespace:

<attributeGroup name="AssociationAttributeGroup">
  <annotation>
    <documentation>
    XLink components are the standard method to support hypertext referencing in XML. An XML Schema 
    attribute group, gml:AssociationAttributeGroup, is provided to support the use of Xlinks as 
    the method for indicating the value of a property by reference in a uniform manner in GML.
    </documentation>
  </annotation>
  <attributeGroup ref="xlink:simpleLink"/>
  <attribute name="nilReason" type="gml:NilReasonType"/>
  <attribute ref="gml:remoteSchema">
    <annotation>
      <appinfo>deprecated</appinfo>
    </annotation>
  </attribute>
</attributeGroup>

In non-corrected GML 3.2.1 schema files the XLink namespace is imported from the OGC version of the XLink schema:

<import namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" schemaLocation="http://schemas.opengis.net/xlink/1.0.0/xlinks.xsd"/>

In this file the simpleLink attributeGroup is defined like this:

<attribute name="href" type="anyURI"/>
...
<attributeGroup name="simpleLink">
  <attribute name="type" type="string" fixed="simple" form="qualified"/>
  <attribute ref="xlink:href" use="optional"/>
  <attribute ref="xlink:role" use="optional"/>
  <attribute ref="xlink:arcrole" use="optional"/>
  <attribute ref="xlink:title" use="optional"/>
  <attribute ref="xlink:show" use="optional"/>
  <attribute ref="xlink:actuate" use="optional"/>
</attributeGroup>

The thing that will change in July 2012 is all the schema files of all affected OGC standards will modified to point to the W3C official XLink 1.1 schema available at http://www.w3.org/XML/2008/06/xlink.xsd. The href attribute definition in the W3C XLink schema is only slightly different from the OGC version:

<xs:attribute name="href" type="xlink:hrefType"/>
<xs:simpleType name="hrefType">
  <xs:restriction base="xs:anyURI"/>
</xs:simpleType>
...
<xs:attributeGroup name="simpleAttrs">
  <xs:attribute ref="xlink:type" fixed="simple"/>
  <xs:attribute ref="xlink:href"/>
  <xs:attribute ref="xlink:role"/>
  <xs:attribute ref="xlink:arcrole"/>
  <xs:attribute ref="xlink:title"/>
  <xs:attribute ref="xlink:show"/>
  <xs:attribute ref="xlink:actuate"/>
</xs:attributeGroup>

This means that all XML files using xlink:href attribute valid against the OGC XLink schema are also valid against the W3C XLink 1.1 schema. However because the attribute group “simpleLink” in the OGC schema is called “simpleAttrs” in the W3C schema, the XML schema files using this attribute group will no longer be valid after the change. To fix this all the schema files using the “simpleLink” attribute group will have to be changed to use the “simpleAttrs” instead.

This change has to be done simultaneously to as many schema files as possible, because the XML validators become confused if they encounter two different schema versions of the same XML namespace. In addition to the OGC’s schema files, the same change should also be done to any other schemas using the OGC version of the XLink schema available at http://schemas.opengis.net/xlink/1.0.0/xlinks.xsd. To force the users to do this change, the OGC Architecture Board has decided to remove the OGC XLink schema file along with the other schema changes.

According to a mailing list post by Carl Reed, the CTO of the OGC, on 12th April 2012, at least the following OGC standards are affected by this change:

  • All versions of WM context
  • All versions of GML since version 2.0.0
  • All profiles of GML since 2.0.0
  • Image CRSs
  • All versions of OpenLS since version 1.1.0
  • All versions of OWS Common since 1.0.0
  • Symbology Encoding 1.0
  • All versions of SLD since 1.0.0
  • All versions of SensorML (including 2.0)
  • All versions of SWE Common
  • Table Join Service
  • All versions of Web Coverage Service
  • Web Feature Service 2.0
  • Web Map Service 1.3
  • WMTS
  • Web Processing Service

There are probably other schemas and standards in addition to this list because the schemas are inter-linked. Especially the different version of GML are used in many other OGC schemas.

Further quoting the announcement from Carl Reed about the OGC actions to be taken:

The target date for implementing change is the weekend of July 21, 2012.

The process will be:

  • Scan schema repository for import of xlink to find a list of standards that use xlink.
  • Also scan for strings such as Gml:ReferenceType to find other possible places that xlink is required.
  • Whatever schema uses any of XLink schema components will need to replace the schema location. We need to do this for all schemas that import xlink. All these changes will be done to a copy of the existing OGC schema repository.
  • For software developers, they need to patch their products to use the revised OGC schemas.
  • Everyone will need to delete local copies, get a new copy from the OGC schema repository, and use the new schemas. There is also the possibility to use a tool such as the OASIS XML Catalogue to override the required change and to continue using the old XLink.
  • In July, we will then issue one global corrigendum for all the affected standards. Essentially, the current OGC schema repository will be replaced with the schemas that have been changed (and tested). The actual standards documents will not change – only the schemas. OGC policy is that the schemas are normative and that if there are differences between a standards document and a schema, then the schemas are normative.

This is pretty much the approach I expected the OGC to take when I wrote about this in January.

If you are running or developing software dealing with OGC compliant data or services you really should check that it will still work with the modified versions of the schema files. You can begin testing your software as soon as the modified OGC schema files are made available in the alternative OGC schema repository. One of the simplest ways to test this is to use the OASIS XML Catalog to temporarily redirect the requests for the schema files of the modified standards’ namespaces to the alternative OGC schema locations. If your software supports the XML Catalog a catalog.xml file with directives something like the following should do the trick (assuming that the modified OGC schemas would be made available under the domain alternative.schemas.opengis.net):

<!DOCTYPE catalog
  PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
         "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd">
<catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"
         prefer="public">
  <rewriteURI uriStartString="http://schemas.opengis.net/gml/"
		rewritePrefix="http://alternative.schemas.opengis.net/gml/" />
  <rewriteURI uriStartString="http://schemas.opengis.net/wfs/"
		rewritePrefix="http://alternative.schemas.opengis.net/wfs/" />
  ....
  [etc for all affected standards]
</catalog>

When an XML validator using this catalog needs to fetch any xml files from URLs beginning with “http://schemas.opengis.net/gml/” it will try to fetch them from “http://alternative.schemas.opengis.net/gml/” instead. The benefit from this approach is that you will be able to simulate schema switch-over well before the actual change in July without making any changes to your code or data files.

You can also use the XML Catalog if you find that you must delay the schema changes for your local system. To do this you can take local copies from the unmodified OGC schema files and create another set of rewriteURI directives. Assuming that the local schema files are stored under /etc/xml/schemas/original/ogc/:

<!DOCTYPE catalog
  PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
         "http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd">
<catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"
         prefer="public">
  <rewriteURI uriStartString="http://schemas.opengis.net/gml/"
		rewritePrefix="file:///etc/xml/schemas/original/ogc/gml/" />
  <rewriteURI uriStartString="http://schemas.opengis.net/wfs/"
		rewritePrefix="file:///etc/xml/schemas/original/ogc/wfs/" />
  ....
</catalog>