The French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) has published a
first release (in French) of their
identification and classification XML datatypes as a RDDL repository.
INSEE is in charge of several national repositories and this set of
documentations and W3C XML Schema schemas provides normative references for
the XML serialization of identification and classification information
involved in these repositories.
These schemas and documentation do not define the format of complete XML
documents, but sets of elements, attributes and datatypes to be used by any
application manipulating these information. The documentation is currently
available only in French but INSEE should provide English versions of next
releases.
This first release includes the following modules:
- A common module
used by the functional modules.
- SIRET defining an
identification system for French enterprises.
- NIR defining an
identification system for French citizens and residents.
- ISO defining the
identification of countries (based on ISO 3166-1 A2 and A3)
- COG defining the
identification of French geographical entities (from regions and
departments to cities).
- NAF defining the
nomenclature of activities used to classify French companies.
The last three modules are also available with enumerations (ISO-enumeration, COG-enumeration and NAF-enumeration). The
enumerations include the title of each value as a W3C XML Schema foreign
attribute and they can be used as lookup tables. They are generated through
XSLT transformation of Excel spreadsheets saved as XML.
These variants provide a better control on the values, but being based on
the latest versions of these nomenclatures, they will not validate document
using values that have been deleted. Each application is thus able to choose
between a basic control of the lexical space and a control against full
list of values.
A frame version (ala
JavaDoc) is also available.
These documentations and the associated schemas are published as RDDL
documents (called RDDL repositories in the RDDL jargon) and have been
authored using the principle of Literate Programming and the DocBook
"litprog" library.
The stylesheets of the litprog library have been customized to support
shortcuts removing some of the verbosity of RDDL and implementing extra
features such as the generation of tables of contents and indexes of RDDL
resources.
The goal of the documentations is to be both exhaustive and easy to read. They include the
definition of each concept manipulated in the schemas, examples, links to a
wide range of references and any relevant information (such as the legal
consequences of a misusage of the NIR module which is submitted to heavy
restrictions).
These documents have been authored by Dyomedea for Jean-Pierre Grandjean,
chief of the department "Système statistique d'entreprises" and Franck
Cotton, chief of the team "Technologies de la sécurité et de la
communication" with the help from many INSEE experts.
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