A follow-up to SBML-related post

I contacted the SBML team to discuss the problems I wrote about last week. And I really appreciate their prompt response and collaboration. Especially, I want to thank Michael Hucka, who clarified a lot of things to me.

First of all, as Michael pointed out, XML Schema standard requires the targetNamespace to be an URI, which does not mean this should resolve to a real web resource. So my reasoning about what schemata you obtain when trying to fetch the namespace URI does not hold water.

More importantly, is what are the target namespaces for different SBML standards:
Level 2 Version 1 http://www.sbml.org/sbml/level2
Level 2 Version 2 http://www.sbml.org/sbml/level2/version2
Level 2 Version 3 http://www.sbml.org/sbml/level2/version3

So, libSBML version 2.3.4, indeed, supports Level 2 Version 1 specification only, and it crashes when other version is processed. The SBML team is working on fixes to this problem, and a pre-release version of libSBML 3.0.0 works with the newer specification perfectly fine. You code, however, might need some changes due to architecture redesign in libSBML.

Michael also agreed that it won't hurt to make the web server serve different versions of the SBML schema to different URLs, so the schemata are now served as I (and JAXB) expected.

Summary:

1. Check the schema twice, and make sure that you are really using the proper schema.
2. If you need to support SBML L2 V 2 or 3 - use libSBML 3.0.0
3. Thanks to everyone from the SBML team for your help