XMI24 — Which type of name should be used

This problem is preventing me from implementing a XMI 2.0 Schema generator for a MOF 1.4 metamodeling environment. The specification is often unclear about which type of name (short name, fully-qualified name, or namespace-qualified name) should be used. >From section 1.8.1: “The XML element name for each metamodel class, package, and association in a document is its short name.” Then, in section 2.2.1, rule 4 we have “ClassTypeDef ::= "<xsd:complexType name=’" //Name of Class//…”. Now, the w3 xml schema specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-1-20010502/ states that “no complex type definition can have the same name as another simple or complex type definition.” If the spec means that we should use the short name of the Class in rule 4 above, then it isn’t in line with the xml schema specification, because it’s obvious that several classes in different namespaces of the same metamodel can have the same short name. Furthermore, the w3 schema specification defines the name attribute of a complexType declaration to be of type NCName, or ‘non-colonized name’. This means that we can’t use the namespace-qualified name for the Class either. The only solution is to use the fully-qualified name for metamodel elements** when defining their types. **The fully-qualified name of a metamodel element lists all of the encapsulating MOF Namespaces of the element. So, if you have Class A in nested Package B in outermost Package C, the qualified name of A would be ‘C.B.A’.