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Subject: RE: FW: FW: [ubl-dev] looking for practical examples
The two enemies of standards adoption are particularity and legacy, including legacy standards. Particularity tends to dominate, because in the short term it is quicker and easier to accommodate and exploit particularity than to standardize it. Two huge enemies of eBusiness standards are fax and b2b reuse of consumer "self-service" approaches (e.g., customers forcing vendors to rekey invoice data into "portals"). Vanilla XML has a role to play in making the "particular" more palatable and useful by conveying in tags the particularity embedded in the payload data. It of course also has a role in industry standards, so it wins both ways. "Industry standards" sit between "particularity" and "standards." Industry groups such as RosettaNet, PIDX and CIDX (petroleum and chemical) were somewhat self-limiting and confusing - e.g., a chemical company often will also be in both the petroleum and electronics business, but their legacy lives on. UBL is general, but is competing not only with particularity and industry standards, but with its own legacy (xCBL - from CommerceOne) as well as with its legacy competitor (cXML - from Ariba) and of course with classic EDI. Once trading partners have put an eBusiness standard trading relationship into production, it is pretty tough to get that successful relationship migrated to the next generation. Today, xCBL continues to be propagated or at least supported by the hubs like Quadrem (aligned with the mining industry) and Hubspan (somewhat oriented toward electronics), but with no apparent move to UBL. The obvious synergies between open systems and open source software are, in my estimation, not exploited very effectively because many open source vertical software efforts are SME in nature (small and medium company). The various standards groups (not only eBusiness, but in fields such as workflow) represent a bonanza of intellectual property useful in building a fresh start ERP or other system, but that IP addresses problems or offers competitive advantages that open source vertical software designers may not see as problems or opportunities. All of the standards organizations have significant channel problems, because there is no one "selling" standards in the same sense that, for example, SAP and Oracle and IBM sell products. Instead various IT products and solutions providers pull in either particularity or sometimes a particular subset of "standard," but rarely the whole standard. Fulton Wilcox Colts Neck Solutions LLC -----Original Message----- From: stephengreenubl@gmail.com [mailto:stephengreenubl@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Green Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 7:30 AM To: Alexander Whillas Cc: ubl-dev@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: FW: FW: [ubl-dev] looking for practical examples Hi Alex I agree things are static. There seems to me to be a valid reason: although UBL is an open standard, most of the implementations are probably not all that open, in the community sense of the word. The uptake from the open source world isn't all that great (there does seem to be some antithesis between open source and open standards - mainly on the open source side I would say - and I've not much idea why). This is not the same with XML where there are still people being very vocal about what they do with XML. I would accept that most UBL implementations are going to be guarded by intellectual property concerns, etc. People don't tend to tell the world what they are doing when it comes to the detail of their systems when those systems are financial and legal in their nature. Perhaps it is worry about the tax man just as much about the competition :-) I guess most folk using UBL will have made it a requirement to the customisation work on their SAP or similar system and that their SAP consultants aren't allowed to talk about it on open lists. Certainly UBL adoption isn't static. I guess it's out of the hype phase though. I've looked from time to time at other languages like GS1-XML to see what their profile is on Google: They are hardly 'visible' that way at all. That certainly doesn't reflect their adoption rate and activity though. UBL is relatively more open and has a much higher profile but it is likely it doesn't get as much adoption because the EDI world (less open and high profile) tends to go with the same standards organisations they are used to when it comes to the XML equivalent - that's my guess. They don't make any song and dance about using XML in an EDI way though. They just do it quietly or choose to announce it in the news rather than blogs. UBL is quite different because it is an open standard and has to do its own advertising rather than relying on existing EDI traditional adopters. It is seeking to make inroads into another area - getting paper to move to electronic rather than just EDI to move to XML. Best regards Steve 2009/2/19 Alexander Whillas <whillas@gmail.com>: > Hi Stephen, > > I did a search for "ubl xml" in google: > http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ubl+xml&btnG=Search > > and just found a whole bunch of static pages. Most disturbing was > httP://ubl.xml.org which looks like it was setup a number of years ago > and there is zero activity in the forums, and no information that > isn't already on the http://docs.oasis-open.org pages. Particularly I > found it hard to find examples of usage, particular for the Catalogue. > I would expect to at least finds blog posts or forum discussions about > peoples experiences with UBL. I found none. > > I didn't see any results from the mailing list in that search. Given > that I've been on here for two weeks and this is the only discussion > going on (perhaps there is a more active list I'm not aware of?), in > my estimate there isn't much life in the UBL community, at least > online anyway. > > I guess the trouble with mail list is they aren't very SEO friendly > and require a commitment (i.e. the signup process and willingness to > receive large amounts of mail most irrelevant to the individual who > will have a particular topic of interest within the larger community). > Online forums and RSS have reversed this community model from push to > pull. > > alex > > 2009/2/18 Stephen Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>: >> Alexander >> >> On point 3, what criteria do you use for this one? I thought there >> was overwhelming coverage of UBL/its mailing lists on Google >> searches. >> >> On point 1, I agree. >> >> On point 2, there has been talk of such a guild, maybe more coming >> soon but there is ubl.xml.org >> >> >> >> 2009/2/18 Alexander Whillas <whillas@gmail.com>: >> ... >> >>> I was then take-a-back at: >>> 1. the immensity of the UBL 2.0 specification, >>> 2. the lack of any apparent guild to comprehend it (save for the good >>> work of Crane Softwrights Ltd., but still nothing like anything the >>> W3C publish), >>> 3. almost complete lack of web presence or penetration of online >>> communities given its age/"maturity" (which makes me fear for my time >>> investment). >>> >> ... >>> >>> with complements >>> >>> A R B Whillas BsCS >>> >>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: ubl-dev-unsubscribe@lists.oasis-open.org >>> For additional commands, e-mail: ubl-dev-help@lists.oasis-open.org >>> >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> Stephen D. Green >> >> Document Engineering Services Ltd >> >> >> >> http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+22:37 .. and voice >> > > > > -- > _.,-*~'`µ`'~*-,._.,-*~'`µ`'~*-,._ > SKYPE: awhillas > mobile: +49 176 651 33969 > http://alex.tsd.net.au/cpill > _.,-*~'`µ`'~*-,._.,-*~'`µ`'~*-,._ > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: ubl-dev-unsubscribe@lists.oasis-open.org > For additional commands, e-mail: ubl-dev-help@lists.oasis-open.org > > -- Stephen D. Green Document Engineering Services Ltd http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+22:37 .. and voice --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: ubl-dev-unsubscribe@lists.oasis-open.org For additional commands, e-mail: ubl-dev-help@lists.oasis-open.org
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