There are many XML validators and parsers available to developers today, and many versions of those applications and toolkits, whilst we cannot claim to be supported by all of these applications the DIGGSML group do try and maintain schemas that are universally compatible with both the leading commercial and open source offerings.

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After version 0.9.2 DIGGSML was split into several parts to aid its development and there have been some problems with using the schemas in various different parsers, many stemming from the xsi:schemaLocation attribute and it's varied implementation.

This article explains reasons behind the move from relative paths to canonical URI's and how to use the included catalog file to tell your parser where to find your local copy of the schemas.

DIGGSML is an international standard, and since many people all over the world speak different languages DIGGSML must respect this. Whilst the element names themselves are in "international English" their content can often be in one (or more) different languages.

This article will explain the best practices for internationalising a DIGGSML file, including how to implement a bi-lingual file.

As of Friday 10th August 2007 DIGGSML v0.9 has been released for internal review.

See inside for a comprehensive list of changes and instructions on how to obtain this release.

Roger's earlier article entitled The Importance of AGS Key Fields for Sample Data explained some of the problems involved with transferring sample data in AGS 3.1.

This article will define exactly what is meant by a Sample and a Specimen, how they differ in meaning within DIGGSML and how they relate to each other. This article will explain some of the methods of transferring Sample and Specimen data that were considered for DIGGSML and detail the method finally chosen and the reasons behind its choice.

I will also include some best practices for companies implementing DIGGSML in the real world to help make the use of DIGGSML as productive as possible.

Key Fields play a vital part in the structure of AGS 3.x data. This article shows some of the problems commonly encountered when transferring data in the AGS SAMP and test tables and gives guidence on how to minimise and eliminate these problems.

Keep checking back for the next in this series on sample referencing as we explain how DIGGSML solves these problems soon.

What is a CRS?

DIGGSML brings a great benefit with it, it actually validates the data in the file, knowing wether a property should be a length, mass, pressure or a great number of other measurements, this article shows how DIGGSML enforces valid data by only allowing a file to validate once it contains all the information required to represent a property.

Before Chris and I start to dive in and explain how DIGGS fits together I thought it would be useful to clarify the terms that we are going to use when describing the structure of DIGGS.