This section describes the processing model of the online showcase which allows a user to perform a ‘diffing’ between two taxonomy versions.
Step 1
The showcase provides a web service, which performs the diffing. Before a diffing can be executed on the sever, the user must upload two taxonomy versions to the server. In the image on the right, version 1 is called "Tax A" and the later version, version 2 "Tax B". To provide better functionality taxonomies can be uploaded together by selecting a zip containing all the relevant taxonomy files. The files are automatically unpacked on the server.
Step 2
In the next step the taxonomies are separately loaded into the diffing support system. The user selects a schema file for each taxonomy, which is the starting point for discovery of each DTS. All schemas and linkbases which are connected to the selected file are then discovered.
The respective namespaces of DTS1 and DTS2 are extracted and displayed in the user interface of step 3.
2: load taxonomy versions into the system
Step 3
This step defines a mapping between the namespaces of the old schemata and the new ones. The purpose is to identify the equivalent concepts in both versions.
After mapping the namespaces in the interface on the client side, they will be passed to the server for further processing.
3: create namespace mapping
Step 4
All required information for the diffing are now available on the server and the diffing is performed out of DTS 1, DTS 2 and the namespace mapping.
The diffing result is stored in the diffing linkbase as defined in Design Considerations and provided as a download. At the end of this page a code example of a diffing linkbase can be found.
4: execute diffing and capture results in a diffing linkbase
Step 5
To create a human readable change log, both taxonomy versions and the diffing linkbase are loaded into the same DTS. This enables the visualisation mechanism to access the information stored in the diffing linkbase and combine it with the information of both taxonomy versions.
5: visualise the information of a diffing linkbase in a change log
Generic Linkbase Schema Files and related Diffing Files
Click here