Srinivas Summary of EML
From Trust The Vote
Notes on EML:
Contents |
Questions
- What types of datasets (represented in John's OSDV arch documents) are reasonably well described by existing EML specs?
- Conversely, which ones are NOT modeled currently?
John's notes from e-mail
- An intro to EML, from Oct 2004 by David Mertz:
- The EML representation of a ballot is fairly good and helpful as part o fthe I/O of voting devices and scanning/tabulation devices.
- The precinct/district/address/voter set of E-R datasets, not sure..?
General stuff
- What are the different OSDV datasets that are in need of EML models?
- Voter registration record (stored in the State Voter DB)
- Precinct by precinct pollbook entries
- Precinct election definition
- Ballot specification definition
- Ballot layout definition
- Cast vote records
- In the slide, the tallying and CVR handling is omitted
EML Oct2004 Intro
- Based on EML v3
- EML intended to support:
- Elections at many different levels and for many different types of organizations - Voting over many channels, e.g. traditional voting booths, DRE,.. - Tabulation and voting rules such as ranked preference, cumulative, .. - Voter registration and other metadata
- EML has been used in EURO govts and some NGOs
- EMLv3 provides XML schemas for:
- Candidate Nomination handling - Voter Registration - Polling information, election notices, etc - Ballot information - Voter Authentication - Vote casting and confirmation - Election counts and results - Audit data
- Pointers to other resources:
- Open Voting Consortium: + http://www.openvoting.org - OASIS Election and Voter Services TC (manage EML specs): + http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/election/
OASIS EML Latest Version
- As of June2008, EMLv5 is the latest standard version of EML
- EMLv5 was approved in Dec2007 - Interesting note: Joseph Hall was involved in the EML spec and was involved in the CA TTBR project
- Where to find EMLv5 docs:
- http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/index.php#eml5.0
- The most useful of these to start with is:
- http://docs.oasis-open.org/election/eml/v5.0/os/EML-Process-Data-Requirements-v5.0.html
- The schemas themselves can be browsed here:
- http://docs.oasis-open.org/election/eml/v5.0/os/EML-Schemas-v5.0/
- EMLv5 Process and Data Requirements Document, in brief:
- Goals of EML remain basically the same as described above - However they explicitly note that EML is to be flexible enought to be used for elections that are either paper based or "e-enabled" - Also, they explicitly attempt to create a multilingual, multinational, secure election data standard - They describe in section 3 their view of what a generic election process looks like - Security considerations for EML in section 4: + Mostly pretty general and high level + Section 4.4 and specifically Figure 3A is worth looking at further
- EML v5's view of the election process and mapping to schema numbers:
- At a high level, election process is broken into: (1) Pre-election (2) Election (3) Post-election - For each of these a number range is allocated for EML schemas, like with FTP commands: - Pre-election: + Election Definitions (1XX) + Candidate Lists/Nominations (2XX) + Options presented to voters in an election (6XX) + Voter registration, polling information (3XX) - Election: + Ballots, Cast vote records,etc. (4XX) - Post-Election: + Vote counts, results, etc (5XX)
Relation between EML schemas and OSDV needs
- From previous section, consider these EML schemas:
- Voter registration record (stored in the State Voter DB) + Look at 310-voterregistration-v5-0.xsd - Precinct by precinct pollbook entries + Look at 310-voterregistration-v5-0.xsd - Precinct election definition + Look at 110-electionevent-v5-0.xsd - Ballot specification definition + 410-ballots-v5-0.xsd - Ballot layout definition + 410-ballots-v5-0.xsd - Cast vote records + 440-castvote-v5-0.xsd
- The next question is, of course, how well do these map to the needs of OSDV?
- The precinct pollbook and election definitions don't seem to have specific analogs, so there might be some mapping needed.
