12 Guidance for OWS Implementation Specifications
12.1 General guidance
This clause provides some guidance for editors of OWS Implementation Specifications, plus authors of drafts and change requests. This guidance is in the form of best practices,
which are not normative but are strongly encouraged.
Some of the recommended practices are: a Implementation Specifications should not duplicate common material. Each
specification should normatively reference all relevant parts of this document. Such normative references may take the form of stating: “The GetCapabilities operation
request shall be as specified in Subclauses 7.2 and 7.3 of OWS Common [OGC 06- 121].”
b The “Normative references” Clause of each OGC Implementation Specification should list this document, and specify a specific OGC document which includes the
version number. c The contents of XML documents should be specified using XML Schemas, not
DTDs. If some of the XML elements or types used are from an external vocabulary for which the only official description is a DTD, this recommendation will not apply.
See Subclauses 12.2 and 12.3 for recommendations on naming and including XML Schema Documents.
d The template for new and revised OGC Implementation Specifications should be used.
NOTE The current TC accepted version of this template is [OGC 05-009r2].
12.2 XML Schema Document file names
Each normative XML Schema Document used to specify the contents of XML documents should be recorded in a separate computer file. The names of these XML
Schema Document files should utilize these naming patterns:
a The version number is not included in the XML Schema Document name, since this information is in the namespace of the schema and in the “version” attribute in the
XML Schema Document. b Each XML Schema Document name begins with the specific OWS abbreviation in
lower case letters, such as wfsUnits.xsd c The name of the operation is the remainder of the file name excluding the .xsd
suffix, when a XML Schema Document includes the top level elements for one operation request and response, such as wmsGetMap.xsd
d The name of the top level element is the remainder of the XML Schema Document file name, when the document contains only one top level element expected to be
referenced outside that schema. If the name of a top level element includes the
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specific OWS abbreviation, it should not be repeated. Therefore, the file name should be wmsGetMapRequest.xsd and not wmsWmsGetMapRequest.xsd.
12.3 XML Schema Document file versions