RE: [ubl-dev] looking for practical examples

[Fulton Wilcox <fulton.wilcox@coltsnecksolutions.com>]

As perhaps exemplified by Ubercart, it may be useful to look through the
other end of the mapping/customization telescope to see whether people can
adapt their internal systems to UBL and related eBusiness standards.
Ubercart has no inventory management module, so adding one is something of a
fresh start.

We are accustomed to dealing with large companies and governments with
internal systems that define "their way", and indeed "their way" is cast in
concrete because they cannot change their internal systems and data
standards. Mapping and customizing UBL is therefore needed to accommodate
"their way" and, one can hope, conceal the peculiarities of "their way" from
their trading partners.

The opposite and in many ways more promising situation is when the trading
entity (or its software supplier) does not have a "their way" at all and may
be open to incorporating UBL and supporting standards into an unformed or
still malleable internal system. People are still "inventing" coding schemes
for, say, unit of measure, because they are not aware of the advantages of
using standards already on the shelf, especially those available at no cost.
Many of the opportunities are in venues far afield from big name supply
chain unstitutions, including Internet 2.0 and open source players.

The question for the standards community is whether we can reach the people
who are preparing to pour concrete and get them to internalize standards
before they do the pour. In some situations, the opportunity might exist to
use native UBL documents as the internal "data base."

The push for internal-external convergence rather than "mapping" has to come
from the external side, because of course internal parties have nothing on
the shelf designed to be used by many companies.


					Fulton Wilcox
					Colts Neck Solutions LLC



-----Original Message-----
From: G. Ken Holman [mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 5:53 PM
To: ubl-dev@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [ubl-dev] looking for practical examples

At 2009-02-10 19:13 +0000, Stephen Green wrote:
>1. Create a new document called, say, Inventory - with your own
>namespace for the document but import the common schemas so
>you can make it almost the same as the UBL Catalogue - just with
>a new InventoryLine, like Ken says, which adds StockQuantity or
>something like that (and maybe a few more things like that). There
>are a few things to make the writing of the schema (like Ken, I too
>strongly recommend keeping to a schema - testing the messages
>that they are valid by the schema - at design stage at least). You
>will want the extra InventoryLine and somewhere to put it in the set
>of schemas. Maybe Ken has an opinion on whether to put this
>aggregate in the document schema (I guess that breaks the NDR,
>Ken) or whether to create not just a custom document schema but
>a 'common' schema too: If the latter then maybe both a basic and
>an aggregates common schema?

Precisely!  The following is a diagram from our training material 
that we delivered in Australia in January, and is now available as 
part of the latest edition of our "Practical Universal Business 
Language Deployment" book (published today!):

   http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/sales/Crane-UBLProfile/#schemasy

I'm proposing to the UBL TC that these diagrams be included in the 
customization guidelines.

>Those technical issues might seem overly detailed.

But I think the approach is sound, which is why it is included in our 
book and training material.

> > And if you can join the TC, bring in your new documents, and find others
to
> > collaborate with in order to come up with flexible and useful 
> configurations
> > of those new documents, they might end up becoming UBL documents!

Which was the reasoning behind creating aggregate and basic schema 
fragments analogous to those of UBL so that the business objects can 
migrate into the common library if the UBL technical committee 
chooses to effect.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

--
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G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/u/
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