March 5th, 2021

Slides

• What to do about ANY? (PDF) presented by Wendell Piez.
• OSCAL document-id Discussion (PDF) presented by Stephen Banghart.

Agenda

• What to do about ANY?

  Discuss if the OSCAL models should make use of XML Schema any and JSON Schema additionalProperties for extension.

• OSCAL document-id Discussion

  • How to uniquely identify a revision to a document in a series of revisions? usnistgov/OSCAL#864
  • How to identify where to get the latest, previous, and next revisions in a series? usnistgov/OSCAL#863

• Open discussion.

Notes

• The discussion around ANY focused on use of the existing link mechanism to reference extra content vs embedded content using <xsd:any/> and additionalProperties=true.
• Use of <xsd:any/> and additionalProperties=true
  • Pros:
    • Easy to embed extended content
  • Cons:
    • Requires parsers to understand how to parse the extended content or skip it.
    • Adds complexity to the OSCAL models.
    • No way to support content conversion between XML<->JSON for non-standard content
    • Need to identify where to add these extension points in the OSCAL models
• Use of OSCAL link
  • Pros:
    • Already supported by the OSCAL models, no changes needed; keep it simple.
    • Extra linked content can be attached as a back-matter/resource to avoid having to retrieve content as a remote resource.
  • Cons:
    • Requires a secondary parse of the linked resource
• Consensus after discussion was to use the link approach for now. Can always add support for <xsd:any/> and additionalProperties=true in a later release.
• Consensus on the call was to accept the changes presented by Stephen with the following changes:
  • The link/rel version-history is not needed since the version history is already supported by the metadata/revisions list.