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Subject: RE:[chairs] New OASIS TC FAQ Pages
Hi, Please find enclosed a html file for CIQ TC FAQ Pages. An FAQ section already exists for the CIQ TC on its web page. I have added additional stuff to it. Please let me know if you need any further information. Regards, Ram Kumar CIQ TC > -----Original Message----- > From: Carol Geyer [mailto:carol.geyer@oasis-open.org] > Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 12:55 PM > To: TC chairs > Cc: Sharon Burbine > Subject: [chairs] New OASIS TC FAQ Pages > > On 25 August, OASIS will be adding a new FAQ page to each TC's public > website. This will make it easier for prospective users, editors, people > who may be considering joining the TC, and others to find answers to > some basic questions on your work. > > Each TC will be responsible for creating its own FAQ content. The > following are just general suggestions to get you started; obviously > each TC will have specific FAQ appropriate for its work. > > What is the need for this specification? > > Who should be involved in this development? > > Who will benefit from this work and how? > > How does this work compare with related efforts at other standards > organizations? > > When will this specification be completed? > > > Please let me know if you need assistance in writing an FAQ for your TC. > Completed FAQs should be sent to support@oasis-open.org before 25 Aug > for posting. You may edit your FAQ at any time after it's posted. > > Regards, > Carol > > ____________________________________________ > Carol Geyer > Director of Communications > OASIS > http://www.oasis-open.org > carol.geyer@oasis-open.org > Voice: +1 978.667.5115 x209 > You may leave a Technical Committee at any time by visiting http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/cam/members/leave_workgroup.phpTitle: >OASIS - OASIS Customer Information Quality TC
1. What is the need for the CIQ specification?
A "customer" or a "party" could be a person or an organisation.
An "Organisation" could be: Company(eg. Commercial, Non Commercial),
Institution (eg. University, School), Not for Profit, Association(eg. club),
Public Service (eg.Railway Station, PostOffice),a Group (eg.Standard body),
etc.
A customer defined here may not be a source of revenue. Any party is defined
as a customer.
In this customer-centric world, as companies move to establish more
effective customer relationships, the need to achieve a precise and
timely view of customer dealings and transactions is recognised as
critical. A direct result of this is the emergence of company-wide
customer management strategies, representing a combination of business
processes, enabling technologies, information management tools and
importantly, customer-centric information.
The pre-requisite for all customer-centric business initiatives is a
total picture of every involvement the enterprise has with any particular
customer - whether individual, household or company. Such information is
the basis for a better understanding of customers' needs and buying motives.
It establishes the foundation for effective one-to-one relationships.
Essential to any effective customer focussed strategy is the need for
customer information that meets the highest possible standards in quality
and integrity. There is little point in relying on a single view of customer
based on incorrect or unreliable information. This can put an entire customer
initiative at risk and could also seriously degrade the customer relationship.
The bottom line is that reliable and accurate customer information is now
more than ever essential in establishing effective customer relationships.
Therefore, customer information management is very critical and hence, the
need to develop a "standard" way of describing Customers (e.g., Identity, Name,
Address, etc.) to support a variety of applications (e.g. CRM, Customer
Profiling, Name and address parsing and matching, customer registration,
customer matching and deduping, address validation, etc) and is very compelling.
When CIQ TC was formed in 2000, there was no single standard for customer
information management that is application independent, vendor neutral and
non proprietary.
2. Who should be involved in this development? Anyone dealing with customers. Anyone with an interest in helping to produce a common standard for exchanging customer information between various processes, applications and systems.
3. Who will benefit from this work and how? Any organization that is planning to define a common standard for customer information across its various lines of business and its various applications. Any organisation that wants to leverage their customer information in a B2B environment. Any organisation that processes customer information differently for different applications (e.g. simple customer registration/point of contact to name and address validation).
4. How does this work compare with related efforts at other standards
organizations?
A separate document is on the CIQ TC web site that compares the work of CIQ TC
with that of other similar efforts. In summary, the work of CIQ TC is unique
in the following ways:
The CIQ Standards are:
- Application independent
- Vendor neutral
- Open
- Truly open (e.g. can handle names and addresses of 240+ countries - can stored
parsed names and addresses of these countries at the element level)
These standards were developed by experts who have several years of experience
dealing with customer centric data globally.
5. When will this specification be completed? The following committee specifications were released in July 2002 and are available for download and use and have been very stable since then: - extensible Name and Address Language (xNAL) Version 2.0 - extensible Name Language (xNL) Version 2.0 - extensible Address Language (xAL) Version 2.0 - extensible Customer Information Language (xCIL) Version 2.0 - extensible Customer Relationships Language (xCRL) Version 1.1
6. Are there any IP, Patent or Royalty issues for CIQ Standards?
CIQ Standards are free of any IP issues (other than OASIS guidelines regarding IP), Patent or Royalty. It is free of any licensing/commercial issues. Anybody can download and use the CIQ standards for free. It is advisable to read the OASIS Copyright notice and policy on IP.
7. CIQ Standards are very rich and complex and my application does not need such complexity to define, say name and address of a customer.
This is the statement we commonly hear from people who look at it. But the main point they miss is that the standard aims at application independency, ie. not specific to a particular application area. Because the standards are application independent, and moreover are designed to handle data at an abstract to detailed level, it is very rich in its structure and appears complex (though, not actually).
8. Why are xNL and xAL complex?
xNA and xAL are not complex as they appear. This is the statement we commonly hear from people who look at it. But the main point they miss is that the standard aims at application independency, ie. not specific to a particular application area. The objective of xNAL is to support: - Addresses of 241+ Countries - Represented in 5,000+ languages/dialects - With 130+ Address Formats, and - With 36+ Personal Name formats Lot of effort were put into designing our standard to cope up with the above complexity and at the same time to make the DTDs/W3C schemas as simple as possible to use without using any complex XML extensions at it will only complicate the parisng process of the application using the XML data. You will note that the flexibility in design allows users to either go for aan abstract representation of an address or a detailed representation of an address. The following example will help one understand that it is upto the user to represent the data using xNAL standards in a simple or complex manner. 23 Archer Street Chatswood, NSW 2067 Australia This address can be defined in atleast five different ways depending upon your needs to represent the address. Click here to view the above address example in XML. We have tested the name and address standards on over 100 countries and are continuing to test on the remaining countries. Examples from the other standards initiatives have also been converted to XML using xNAL. More examples (international) can be downloaded from the TC web site. Similar flexibility is provided to name standard (xNL) and customer information standard (xCIL). To get "the perfect standard" that is acceptable to every application is no easy task. It is a journey. We encourage feedbacks/criticisms/comments regarding our efforts and this will help us to provide the public with better standards that is useful to their business. We are committed to "open" standards and therefore, we are open to public comments.
9. How is the Name and Address Standard of CIQ TC different from other name and address standard initiatives?
The objective of xNAL (Name and Address Standard) of CIQ is: - Application independent - Truly Global (handle name and address structures of all countries) - Can be applied to any application that use name and address data The CIQ TC has spent close to two years in building xNAL that is application independent and truly global, and hence, can be readily applied to any name and address specific applications including Postal services and address validation. This is where xNAL standard differs from other address standards initiatives around the world that concentrate on a specific area namely, Postal Services. Note that name and addresses are important customer data elements in many applications also and not just Postal services alone. Not every application that uses customer name and address data is for postal business. Name and address, for example, plays a major role in identifying customer relationships. If a Postal Organisation of a country wants to use CIQ standards for defining their postal services, they can build a standard/application around the xNAL standard that is very domain specific for their postal services. Given that xNAL is designed to handle the address structures of all countries at an abstract or detailed level, it make it easier for applications to concentrate on building domain specific standards/applications around xNAL. Click here to open a document that compares xNAL with other Name and Address Standard initiatives.
5. What is the difference between OASIS, CIQ stuff and the Electronic Commerce Code Management Association (ECCMA) stuff other than that one represents software vendors and the other users for a master collection of electronic commerce code sets and or ontology's? If my understanding is correct, they both appear to have adopted similar concepts but different techniques for doing the same job, or competitors in the same space (standards proliferation)? (March 2002)
See answer to question 3. CIQ Name and address standards, customer information standards and customer relationships standards started off from the perspective of a customer and not from theperspective of mail delivery. The objective is to define standards that define customer/profile information that is application independent, vendor neutral, open and importantly, "Global". We spent two years defining international name and address standard that is application independent. Because it has to be application independent (eg. not specific to aplication such as postal services as name and address data is not only used for postal services, but for other porposes as well), we have to ensure that the standard is flexible enough to handle any applications for name and address. This is where our group differs from any other group that is working on international name and address standards. The other groups working on international name and address standards are: GCA- ADIS, CEN-WG331, UN*PROLST. The only objective of these groups are to develope a standard for postal services (eg. expedient delivery of mail). The ECCMA code tables are to represent every individual name and address element with a common code number and this is specifically for mailhouse activities (eg. mail printing). It is interesting to note that the ECCMA Coide tables are very biased towards US Postal System atleast at this stage as it includes codes for USPS specific data such as: - Date of ZIP Code change - Congressional District Code - USPS specific internal ID code - etc Note that these groups are yet to develop a standard that is "global". Reason, a request for support from all postal unions around the world on this initiative was sent out only recently. An international address element and template information is gathered by the UPU which will then be added to the ECCMA IAEC tables. The hope is that this effort will reflect the addresses of all the world posts!. It should also be noted that only 20-30 countries of the 241 countries have a formal national postal address file and that too a streamlined postal service in place. It is a long way before a truly internatoional name and address standard for postal services agreed by all postal unions around the world is developed by these groups. A developed country like Australia for example, streamlined its postal service only last year(2001). Note that the CIQ standard does provide options to store this ECCMA code tables and some data items that are specific to postal services. CIQ name and address standard is infact a superset of the other name and address standard initiatives. It also provides multiple occuring flex field element with a type attribute that shall enable applications to use this element to define their application specific data.
10. What are the criteria and business value to an organization for selecting CIQ over the other similar standards in defining the organizations baseline architecture? (March 2002)
If your organisation wants to use name and address not for just postal services, but also for other purposes as well (eg. customer profile management, contact management, employee information, CRM apps, customer identification, name and address parsing and validation, etc), then CIQ is the best choice as it is designed to accommodate all these aplications. If your organisation wants to use name and address standard that can be extended to other customer information (eg. tel, fax, email, url, customer id, customer relationships, etc.) that are unique to the customer, then CIQ is the best choice.
11. Is CIQ working with other similar standard groups?
CIQ is committed to collaborative work. CIQ is trying hard all these years to foster alignment with other similar standard initiatives. Given that CIQ has already done the important base work of defining standards that are global and application independent, it makes life easier for other groups to extend the standard for domain specific applications such as postal services. CIQ and OASIS in general, are open for any collaborative work in an "open" process manner to ensure that there is no duplication of work. CIQ is speaking to groups like CEN WG331, USPS, UN*PROLST, GCA ADIS, CPExchange, and others. It is hard to collaborate politically, but it is easier technically.
12. Are CIQ Standards such as xNAL designed for the CRM world only?
Absolutely not. They have been designed to be application independent. Let us say, for example, in an organisation or a government sector, there are many applications dealing common data such as name and address. The applications using say, name and address could be a CRM, user registration on web, billing, marketing, sales, name and address cleansing and quality, etc. The optimal way to interoperate name and address data is to store the name and address information in a common format that can be applied or reused across different applications. But organisations often end up storing name and address data in many different formats specific to the applications and hence, are unable to integrate different applications to meet business needs (eg. integrate applications to get all info. about a party). To store name and address information in a common format, you need a standard that is flexible enough to be applied to different requirements of the application. This is precisely what CIQ standards have been defined for and this is why it is flexible to store simple user registration data (eg. address line 1, address line 2, city, state, postcode, country) to detailed level of data for complex aplications like name and address parsing and matching which requires detailed level of elementisation of the name and address data.
13. Where can I find more information about CIQ?
The CIQ web site is the best choice (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ciq). There is also a powerpoint presentation material about OASIS CIQ on this site. This will give you an insight on how we differ from other groups and what our goals/objectives are.
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