Dear David,

Thank you for your public comment regarding the OASIS Code List Representation TC work:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/codelist-comment/200610/msg00000.html

We discussed it by e-mail and at our last teleconference. I am replying on behalf of the TC.

It is always easiest to reply to specific comments about a specific version of specification (or draft thereof). Your comments are more general in character. For the most part, your comments appear to be targetted at people who are implementing run-time code list validation mechanisms. Run-time validation mechanisms are outside of the scope of the current work of the TC. The current work is focussed on modelling and encoding code lists for transmission between users and systems. How implementers of run-time validation systems choose to use that code list information, and represent it for run-time usage, is not in scope. We expect there will be many ways that people will use this information (e.g. in repositories and database tables, encoded into XML Schemas and Java enumeration classes, etc.).

We discussed your comments about constructing XML documents so that they are composed of logical parts that can be externally referenced. We note that these comments apply to XML generally, not to code lists in particular. As such, this TC isn't planning to define a generic mechanism of that sort (nor software to support that mechanism). We are potential users of such mechanisms defined elsewhere (including XInclude, for example).

Note that we have just published our requirements document for informal public review

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=20944

and that this document references materials that have been contributed to the TC as an input (see

http://www.genericode.org/

Cheers, Tony.