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Subject: [ubl-comment] Re: UBL and UN/CEFACT


As chair of the OASIS UBL Technical Committee, I welcome the
recent message from Ralph Berwanger, Jamie Clark, Klaus-Dieter
Naujok, and Ray Walker expressing their interest in pursuing a
closer relationship between UN/CEFACT and the UBL initiative.

In this message I would like to briefly review the history of the
UBL-UN/CEFACT relationship to this point, summarize the issues,
and set forth what seem to me to be the viable alternatives going
forward.

First, however, a process issue.  The message to which I am
responding was sent to five different mailing lists:

   ubl-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
   cefact-ewg@list.unicc.org
   un-tmwg@gefeg.com
   ebtwg@lists.ebtwg.org
   ebxml-mgmt@lists.ebxml.org

As far as I know, only one of these lists, ubl-comment, is
publicly subscribable.  Since everyone in the world can subscribe
to ubl-comment, and since cross-posting is in any case generally
considered bad practice, I am going to send this reply only to the
ubl-comment list and ask those copied on the previous message to
forward this reply to the remaining lists along with a request to
subscribe to ubl-comment if people are interested in pursuing the
discussion.  The ubl-comment list can be subscribed to using the
list manager at

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl

People who come into this discussion late will be able to catch up
using the publicly visible ubl-comment archive.

##################################################################
HISTORY
##################################################################

The ebXML initiative ruled the development of a standard XML
payload syntax out of scope early in the project (Brussels, May
2000).  UBL arose from a desire on the part of some ebXML
participants to supply what they saw as the piece needed to
complete the ebXML framework envisioned in the specifications that
were eventually released May 2001 in Vienna.

The purpose of this group as it has evolved over the two and a
half years since the ebXML meeting in Brussels can be summarized
as the rapid development of a standard cross-industry payload
syntax designed for use in ebXML and similar XML-based B2B
frameworks and having the following characteristics:

 - Builds on existing EDI practice and recent XML marketplace
   experience while anticipating future directions in
   web-service-based B2B technologies

 - Captures the semantics of current EDI standards and industrial
   XML vocabularies

 - Incorporates the experience of the widest possible array of
   business domain experts

 - Reflects the lessons gained in two decades of SGML and XML
   document design

 - Utilizes the expressive power of XML schemas

 - Employs a library-based data architecture that will enable the
   application of ebXML context methodology in order to produce
   document formats tuned for particular trading contexts

 - Aligns with the ebXML Core Components effort for semantic
   harmonization

 - Aligns with the UNeDocs effort and existing fax- and
   paper-based business processes in order to promote adoption by
   small and medium-sized enterprises

 - Is free from intellectual property claims

 - Can serve as an international standard for the electronic
   representation of business documents

A pragmatic decision was made early in the UBL project to base the
work on an existing XML library rather than starting from scratch.
At the beginning of 2001, the xCBL specification was chosen as the
basis for this work for the following reasons:

 - xCBL 1.0 was developed in 1997 under a grant from the
   U.S. government that put the work in the public domain

 - xCBL 2.0 added significant functionality needed for use in
   industrial ecommerce marketplaces

 - xCBL 3.0 added EDI semantics, including an explicit mapping to
   UN/EDIFACT and X12 EDI

 - xCBL uses a library architecture that maximizes the reusability
   of shared data structures and satisfies the UBL requirement for
   the future application of ebXML context methodology

 - xCBL is licensed under terms that allow the free creation of
   derivative works without royalties or other fees

 - xCBL has been widely deployed and represents four years of
   practical experience in the use of XML for electronic commerce

The decision to adopt xCBL as a starting point for UBL
accomplished a number of practical objectives but also led many
people to the mistaken assumption that UBL would resemble xCBL.
After a year of UBL development, however, it is now quite clear
that this is not the case; UBL is very much its own specification
and is as independent of xCBL as it would have been if development
had started from nothing.  The basic difference is that UBL is
about four years further along in its development than it would
have been if we had not started with an existing XML business
library.  A recent review package containing the data model and
XML schema for UBL Order and Order Response, together with a
library of about 500 reusable data elements, is available for
download, inspection, and public comment via the ubl-comment list;
for details, see the announcement at

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-comment/200208/msg00028.html

UBL was proposed as an OASIS Technical Committee in February 2001.
A delay in the creation of the TC allowed the group to consider
the possibility of forming in UN/CEFACT instead.  After a meeting
in April 2001, I was authorized to propose the formation of UBL as
an XML Syntax Subworking group within the EDIFACT Working Group of
UN/CEFACT.  This proposal was submitted to the CEFACT Steering
Group (CSG) in May 2001 but was rejected due to a planned
restructuring of CEFACT that was considered at that point to be
imminent.  Suspecting that the CEFACT reorganization might take
some time to accomplish and eager to begin its work, the UBL
organizing committee went ahead with plans to work in OASIS until
the CEFACT reorganization was complete.  UBL was formally
constituted as an OASIS Technical Committee in October 2001.

With the meeting this week of the new CEFACT Forum, the
reorganization of UN/CEFACT has reached a stage where the
discussion of future coordination between UBL and UN/CEFACT is now
felt to be productive.  In the meantime, however, UBL has
attempted to fulfill the requirement for the widest possible range
of business input by co-locating UBL meetings with meetings of the
EDIFACT Working Group (March 2001) and ASC X12 (June 2001) and by
establishing relationships with a number of industry data
standards organizations through the appointment of liaisons to the
UBL Liaison Subcommittee.  For details, see the LSC web page at

   http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/lsc/

The existence of these relationships with industry data standards
organizations has added another dimension to the discussion of
relations between UBL and UN/CEFACT.

##################################################################
UBL-UN/CEFACT ISSUES
##################################################################

Notwithstanding the decision to move ahead in OASIS during the
UN/CEFACT reorganization, several discussions have taken place
within UBL regarding the potential for UBL-UN/CEFACT
collaboration.  The most recent of these discussions took place in
the UBL Liaison Subcommittee during the June UBL meeting hosted by
ASC X12.  The relevant portion of the minutes from that meeting
(5 June 2002) reads as follows:

/==================================================================
| 
| Relationship with UN/CEFACT
| 
|    The chair reported on the previous day's meeting with X12 COTG
|    and the invitation extended by Ralph Berwanger to consider
|    putting UBL into the new UN/CEFACT Forum.
| 
|    A couple of general problems with the new CEFACT structure were
|    noted:
| 
|     - That domain working group procedures are being determined by
|       people outside of the domain groups
| 
|     - That there are no determinative criteria for establishing
|       compliance with a UMM requirement
| 
|    Particular problems with UBL functioning in CEFACT were noted:
| 
|     - That the UMM process is not applicable to work that is
|       attempting a synthesis of existing XML syntaxes
| 
|     - That organizationally, UBL is a unique task group attempting
|       to accomplish a specific project and would have to stay that
|       way to work inside CEFACT
| 
|     - That some groups within the new Forum have a mandate that
|       overlaps ours
| 
|    Conditions that would have to be established if we were to join
|    CEFACT were noted:
| 
|     - UBL would need to be its own group, not part of another
| 
|     - The CCs and BIEs coming from the UBL work would have to be
|       introduced into the CEFACT harmonization process and not
|       vetoed or modified on methodological or non-technical
|       grounds
| 
|     - It would have to be recognized that the "open development
|       process" is inappropriate to this project (we can't have
|       non-participants trying to change the specifications)
| 
|    It was noted that our default position (continue as an OASIS
|    TC) has some advantages:
| 
|     - That we can function to pull together the experts from X12
|       and EDIFACT as well as a number of vertical industry data
|       exchange organizations
| 
|     - That the alternative in which CEFACT outsources this work to
|       us continues to be attractive (though the UMM and
|       development processes remain issues)
| 
|     - That our current position makes us much more responsive to
|       the needs of organizations like ACORD than if we were part
|       of CEFACT
| 
|    The LSC concluded that at this time we should try to become
|    CEFACT's preferred provider of XML syntax and XML design rules
|    while maintaining separate ownership and should urge that the
|    UBL design rules should become the default for ebXML
|    CC-compliant XML syntax development efforts.
| 
\==================================================================

The conclusion stated above remains the position of the UBL
Liaison Subcommittee.

##################################################################
RESPONSE TO MESSAGE FROM BERWANGER, CLARK, NAUJOK, AND WALKER
##################################################################

I would now like to consider the message sent 6 September 2002 by
Berwanger et al. and outline what seem to me to be the viable
alternatives at this point.  It should be understood in what
follows that I am expressing my own opinion and cannot formally go
beyond the decisions previously made by the UBL TC and the UBL
LSC.

The message of 6 September states:

| Experts and business user communities have expressed concern to us
| about the duplication of resources between the OASIS UBL project
| and UN/CEFACT's ebXML Core Components project.  Many implementers
| are uncertain about whether the two projects are complementary or
| divergent.  We have also received many inquiries about whether the
| two projects can be combined.

This passage seems to reflect a basic misunderstanding among
implementers about the relationship between UBL and CC.

UBL is not an attempt to standardize business semantics.  UBL is
intended to provide the actual XML syntax for basic business
documents in a form that can be used across industries as well as
within industries, thus enabling the deployment of interoperable,
off-the-shelf B2B systems simply by plugging UBL into the
framework defined by the existing ebXML specifications.  To
accomplish this objective, UBL intends to provide four
deliverables:

 - A set of naming and design rules for B2B XML schemas

 - A library of reusable XML schema components (Business
   Information Entities) that can be assembled into EDI-like XML
   business documents

 - A set of basic standard business document schemas constructed
   from the BIEs in the UBL library

 - A future contextualization technology that builds on the ebXML
   context methodology effort to produce a standard extension
   mechanism for the generation of context-specific document
   schemas

None of these deliverables overlaps the work of the ebXML Core
Component activity.  The apparent overlap between the UBL and CC
work is an artifact of the scheduling of the two efforts.  If
there had been in existence a complete, standard CC library, then
the task of UBL would have simply been to develop design rules for
the production of XML versions of the CCs and to produce the
corresponding XML schema library.  But this is not what we were
given to work with.  The fact of the matter is that today, after a
year of UBL work, there is not in existence a single standard
ebXML core component, let alone a comprehensive standard library
of core components.  In fact, there is not even a final
specification for the definition of ebXML core components.

By adopting a pragmatic strategy, UBL stands today at the end of
five years of XML business library development.  If we had waited
for the standardization of ebXML CC, we would not even have
started yet.  As a result of our efforts, ebXML as a practical
reality is five years closer to realization.  So I view UBL as a
very positive contribution to ebXML.

An additional contribution lies in our intention to submit all the
UBL BIEs to the CC effort.  UBL has been committed to this goal
for its entire existence as an OASIS TC.  It's no coincidence that
the vice chair of the UBL TC is the editor of the CC
specification.  UBL inherits from xCBL a huge collection of
business semantics from EDI and commercial marketplace
initiatives.  The donation of the UBL candidate CCs to the CC
library will make UBL one of the largest contributors to the CC
effort.

To sum up: UBL comprehends far more than the definition of
business semantics, and it is in no way intended as competition to
the ebXML CC work.

The relevance of this point lies in this further passage from the
message of 6 September:

| The CC team and its work currently reside in UN/CEFACT's TMG group
| (along with the UMM and most other UN/CEFACT ebXML projects).
| There may be other equally appropriate solutions.

A consequence of the considerations just outlined is that UBL does
not belong in the Techniques and Methodologies Group (TMG).  UBL
does have a Tools and Techniques Subcommittee that would seem to
align with the TMG, but it constitutes just a small part of the
overall UBL effort.

Since UBL is primarily concerned with syntax definition, the bulk
of its work maps best to the new Applied Technologies Group (ATG),
but there is also apparent overlap with the new International
Trade and Business Processes Group (TBG) and the new Information
Content Management Group (ICG).

UBL has made tremendous progress over the first year of its
existence partly because it unifies the various aspects of the
development of an XML business syntax definition in a single
technical committee.  Indeed, one of the conclusions we're coming
to in the UBL effort is that we need more joint work among the UBL
subcommittees dealing with these various aspects, not less of it.
So one of the biggest hurdles we would face in making the
transition to UN/CEFACT would be preserving this unity in the face
of the far more distributed structure of the new CEFACT
organization.

##################################################################
POSSIBLE OPTIONS
##################################################################

No one seems to deny that there should be a close relationship
between UBL and UN/CEFACT.  The question is how best to accomplish
this without slowing down the UBL work.  Here are what seem to me
to be the most workable options.

OPTION 1: FORM UBL WORKING GROUP IN UN/CEFACT ATG

   Since the ATG is chartered with the definition of specific
   business syntaxes, it would make sense to form EDIFACT,
   UNeDocs, and UBL working groups within the ATG for the
   definition of EDI, paper-based, and XML syntaxes, respectively.
   I seem to remember that something very much like this was
   proposed during the discussions some months ago that led to the
   new CEFACT structure.

   Personally, I find the surface simplicity of this option
   appealing, but substantial changes would have to be made to the
   CEFACT terms of reference to overcome the issues listed above
   by the UBL Liaison Subcommittee and to allow UBL to maintain
   its unified approach and accomplish its objectives on time.  It
   seems to me that the changes to the terms of reference required
   to ensure the integrity of the current work would require
   formal approval by the CEFACT Plenary.  If that's the case,
   then realistically we wouldn't have formal approval for this
   before next spring and wouldn't actually meet under the new
   organization until the following September.

   This delay might not be as bad as it sounds.  For one thing, I
   suspect that a transfer of authority a year out from now would
   actually fit the probable UBL work schedule fairly well.  And
   if UN/CEFACT and the UBL TC could agree on this as a stated
   direction, we could announce it far in advance of its actual
   instantiation.  Such an announcement would go a long way toward
   rectifying the perception that UBL and UN/CEFACT are working at
   cross purposes.

OPTION 2: IMPLEMENT UBL AS A WORKING GROUP OF ISO TC 154

   An option that's received very little public discussion is that
   of implementing UBL as a working group of the ISO body where
   the formal standardization of EDIFACT syntax takes place.

   In terms of pure standards theory, putting UBL in the ISO TC
   responsible for the international standardization of electronic
   business syntaxes makes a lot of sense.  In conversations with
   various people, however, I've not found much enthusiasm for
   this idea.

   For one thing, TC 154 seems to function very well as a
   clearinghouse and a place to formalize technical work done in
   other groups, providing an established, highly regarded process
   for international standardization that doesn't really need to
   have a different kind of project added to it.  Another factor
   making this idea less attractive is that UBL already has a
   clear path to eventual ISO standardization through OASIS's
   Class A Liason status with TC 154, so we would be achieving
   little practical gain at the price of a fair amount of
   procedural churning needed to get UBL added to the TC 154
   schedule of work.  But this alternative may turn out to have
   real merit if it's the only way to get the active cooperation
   of UN/CEFACT work groups without running afoul of the UN/CEFACT
   terms of reference.

OPTION 3: CONTINUE IN OASIS WITH LIAISONS TO TBG

   The easiest option would be to keep UBL in OASIS and add TBG
   domain groups to the UBL Liaison Subcommittee to provide a
   conduit for UN/EDIFACT domain expertise into the UBL work.  The
   EDIFACT Working Group is already represented in the UBL LSC,
   but adding separate liaisons from the various domain groups
   would help to promote the flow of domain-specific input into
   the UBL schemas and would allow us to set up somewhat different
   relationships with the various domain groups depending on the
   state of the work.

   A couple of examples will help to illustrate this.  Consider
   EWG D2 (Purchasing), which is becoming TBG2 in the new
   UN/CEFACT structure.  UBL has already published schemas for
   Order and Order Response (see reference above), so a liaison
   with TBG2 would serve primarily in review mode, organizing the
   detailed response of the purchasing experts in TBG2 to the work
   already accomplished.  The situation might be different with
   EWG D4 (Transport), which is becoming TBG3.  UBL has not yet
   addressed transport documents at all, so the role of TBG3 in
   this relationship might be to actually assemble the XML schemas
   for transport documents using BIEs from the UBL library in
   accordance with the UBL naming and design rules.  In either
   case, modifications and additions discovered in the course of
   domain group analysis would be fed back into the UBL library
   and then conveyed from there into the ebXML CC library.

   While apparently less integrated than a solution that put UBL
   into UN/CEFACT, this arrangement would actually have the
   considerable logistical advantage of allowing the UBL team and
   the UN/CEFACT domain teams to operate in parallel on different
   meeting schedules.  This means that participants in the domain
   groups could concentrate completely on getting the business
   requirements right, while participants in the UBL work could
   concentrate completely on the XML realization of those
   requirements.

   I believe that this alternative would function quite well while
   avoiding any disruption of the UBL work.  Its only real
   disadvantage as things stand right now is that UBL would still
   lack the impramatur of UN/CEFACT.  If UBL were designated the
   "preferred provider" of XML syntax to CEFACT as proposed by the
   UBL LSC, however, this objection could be largely overcome.

There are surely other possible options to be considered here that
haven't occurred to me; I leave it to others in this discussion to
point them out.

Jon Bosak
Chair, OASIS UBL TC



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