Skip to content

ISO 19115 3 Namespaces and Conformance Classes

Jump to bottom
Ted Habermann edited this page Apr 2, 2018 · 6 revisions

Essentially all of the UML packages included ISO 19115 were implemented as one namespace (gmd) in ISO 19139. The all inclusive nature of this namespace caused some difficulties in implementations. ISO 19115-3 introduces new namespaces in order to modularize the standard and support a variety of conformance classes with different breadths and capabilities. The initial guidelines for namespace creation recently adopted by ISO TC211 are:

  1. a minimum of one namespace should be created per UML package in the conceptual model, i.e. multiple UML packages should not be combined into single namespaces
  2. UML packages can be split into multiple namespaces if necessary to ease the implementation and management of the life-cycles of various components
  3. minimize dependencies between namespaces, and eliminate circular dependencies

The ISO 19115-3 namespaces and conformance classes are described schematically in the Figure below. The conformance class schemas (mdb, mds, md1, md2, mda, and mdt) are containers for associating namespace schemas required to address the capabilities of the conformance class.

Metadata tools support different use cases with different requirements and different collections of associated metadata elements. Conformance classes, and their associated schema locations, describe standard collections of requirements that can be supported by metadata tools. Simple tools need only simple capabilities and they can be designed to support simple conformance classes. Tools that support more complete capabilities can use more complete conformance classes. Schema locations in metadata records indicate the capabilities included in the records. Some tools may not support all of those capabilities.

More information is available in wiki pages in this wiki (listed below) and in the namespace directories.

ISO 19115-3 Namespaces

Clone this wiki locally