iLingo - The Language of Insurance e-Business

(C) 1999 Lexica, LLC

3.4.3. Schema Refinement

This extension mechanism is described in the W3C [XML Schema Refinement Task Force Report]. Lexica plans to support this form of schema extension directly, allowing anyone to refine iLingo objects and properties using standard XML techniques.

Although this specification is a work in progress, the current thinking is that one will be able to define a new schema which refines (inherits and extends) the properties of iLingo elements. Documents which adhere to this new schema will still be considered valid iLingo documents. Processes which do not recognize the new schema will only see a subset of the document as defined by iLingo. There are two specific ways in which an iLingo element can be refined: 1) add attributes to existing elements (Attribute Set Refinement) and 2) define new elements which can only be appended to the existing content model of iLingo elements (Content Model Refinement. The following sections describe each of these methods in detail