Re: [ubl-dev] UBL for storing accounting data

[Martin Kleppmann <martin@eptcomputing.com>]

On 6 Mar 2009, at 01:28, G. Ken Holman wrote:
> I'm not sure anyone can promise you that unless they go as far as to  
> what Sun did with their non-assertion covenant:

That is indeed a powerful statement. Did many others follow suit, as  
your message suggested there might be? But I'm happy enough for UBL to  
be RF.

> But such "more explanation" would only be a particular community's  
> interpretation.  The normative definitions are the ones found in the  
> spreadsheets, which I've used to create the HTML reports.

Absolutely; I didn't mean to suggest that any additions should be  
normative. As a community resource, it would be exactly that: a way to  
learn how others in the community are using UBL; an opportunity to  
clarify technical terms whose meaning is clear to experts but not to  
novices; a tool for getting more people interested in UBL by appealing  
to their intuition. Standards documents are hard to read, because they  
have to be so general and so precise; a wiki-like resource would  
complement the standard, and always refer back to the standard for the  
normative definition.

> I'll rattle their chain again to see if I can do the bulk upload of  
> 2000 definitions, one per wiki page.  Then people can add to the  
> definitions with their own ideas of examples and explanations and  
> contexts of use.

That would be great! I imagine one wiki page per type would be most  
suitable, and allow easy cross-linking. Please let me know if I can be  
of any help with exporting the definitions to a human-readable format.

> I was just suggestiong joining so that your contribution to UBL  
> could become an official UBL project, rather than a colloquial UBL  
> project.

I will definitely consider joining.

> I'll bring you up to date if I can get the definitions loaded up on  
> UBL.xml.org.

Excellent, thanks!

Martin