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Subject: Re: [ubl-lcsc] Document instance UUID
On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Chiusano Joseph wrote: >>On the other hand, if the documents were to be stored in a registry >>(such as an ebXML Registry), they would automatically be assigned a UUID >>by virtue of the fact that they are a RegistryObject. Thanks for the comments. Fully agree that real life human references to documents require the more familiar short-form serial numbers. As a side note, one of our company trial proposals to refer to people using UUID in a project was met with no better than frowning faces from the end-users. The idea here is not to have UUID replace any of the IDs, but an additional meta-data to facilitate UBL-processors. It's fine if the documents are assigned further UUIDs or various other tracking numbers within other systems (ebXML registry or otherwise) that are meaningful to those systems, but my concerns are within the scope of UBL, there appears to be no defined means of saying one document is "equal" to another. To do that, we need a consistent way to first address/identify each document instance within the specs of UBL. We carried out an XML Industrial Project earlier last year in Singapore under the premise of IT Standards Committee (http://www.itsc.org.sg/downloads/xip/xip_index.html), and performed some trial exchange of document instances under the XIP project. Some of the experience learned from that small-scale trial was that when we generated and sent out document instances and particularly in close repetition, the receiving processor must decide if they are duplicates and transport level, or are genuine separate instances. Should the processor look at all pairs of document instances to identify duplicates? What number of parameters must the processor examine before the document instances are concluded as the same (ie, is it just looking at sender, recipient and time, or also the items, quantities, unit-price, etc, or entire document, which becomes very processing intensive)? If timing were used for document distinction (the rest of document being the same), how far apart in terms of timing must the document instances be in order for the instances to be considered "separate instances"? If the document serial ID (eg. purchase order ID, invoice number etc) was manually keyed-in (as we simulate some local practice for small companies), the chance of ID re-use (consciously or accidentally) was not insignificant. And we thought it's easier to mandate XIP software to generate unique IDs (using UUID) than to mandate end-users to check that IDs are unique (which defeats the purpose of automation). It's also a form of "self-defence" mechanism so that document instances circulating within XIP were "clean" (unique). I thought sharing this experience here would be useful for a conscious choice between incorporating or excluding UUIDs within UBL document instances. Best Regards, Chin Chee-Kai SoftML
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