UBLish is initially seeded as a simple quick-and-dirty tool to assist the Universal Business Language (UBL) community of users and developers to generate accurate transformations of their Excel spreadsheet data models into UBL-compliant XSD schemas in UBL v1.0-beta. Due to the many Naming and Design Rules (NDR) governing XSD design, which is a necessity to achieve common understanding of various schema facets, human-based manual translation from Excel to UBL schemas is both very time-consuming and prone to errors. With UBLish, not only were the UBL Technical Committe (TC) able to do many more trial runs of temporary schema generation, they would also be assured of transformation accuracy, speed, consistency and removal of basic errors.
On the other hand, any error accidentally left on the source spreadsheet needs to be detected and corrected to produce correct, proper downstream schemas. UBLish screens incoming data from the spreadsheet and establishes basic logical correctness before generating UBL schemas. Examples of logical correctness could be validation of cardinality (eg. 0..0 would be redundant), reference to defined types, detection of potential infinitely-recurring (looped) references, etc.
Since then, there've been recurring calls for a follow-up UBLish to generate UBL v2.0 schemas. I've been kept busy with studies and new-born and couldn't really extract more time out of already blackened eyes. Now that things have stabilized somewhat, I'm been thinking how best to bring things forward.
By moving UBLish v2.0 to SourceForge, a widely respected platform for Open Source development, I'm hoping that users who need UBLish's functions could easily get access to it. Another advantage is that advance users who might even extend its functionalities could also contribute back to the project to expand its overall value. Keen developers are most welcome to join.
Chin Chee-Kai
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UBLish is initially seeded as a simple quick-and-dirty tool to assist the Universal Business Language (UBL) community of users and developers to generate accurate transformations of their Excel spreadsheet data models into UBL-compliant XSD schemas in UBL v1.0-beta. Due to the many Naming and Design Rules (NDR) governing XSD design, which is a necessity to achieve common understanding of various schema facets, human-based manual translation from Excel to UBL schemas is both very time-consuming and prone to errors. With UBLish, not only were the UBL Technical Committe (TC) able to do many more trial runs of temporary schema generation, they would also be assured of transformation accuracy, speed, consistency and removal of basic errors.
On the other hand, any error accidentally left on the source spreadsheet needs to be detected and corrected to produce correct, proper downstream schemas. UBLish screens incoming data from the spreadsheet and establishes basic logical correctness before generating UBL schemas. Examples of logical correctness could be validation of cardinality (eg. 0..0 would be redundant), reference to defined types, detection of potential infinitely-recurring (looped) references, etc.
Since then, there've been recurring calls for a follow-up UBLish to generate UBL v2.0 schemas. I've been kept busy with studies and new-born and couldn't really extract more time out of already blackened eyes. Now that things have stabilized somewhat, I'm been thinking how best to bring things forward.
By moving UBLish v2.0 to SourceForge, a widely respected platform for Open Source development, I'm hoping that users who need UBLish's functions could easily get access to it. Another advantage is that advance users who might even extend its functionalities could also contribute back to the project to expand its overall value. Keen developers are most welcome to join.
Chin Chee-Kai