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05 April 2005
UBL-1.0-SBS-1.0-beta-2
Stephen Green <stephen_green@seventhproject.co.uk>
G. Ken Holman, Crane Softwrights Ltd.<gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>
Tim McGrath <tmcgrath@portcomm.com.au>
This specification defines the Universal Business Language Small Business Subset.
This document is the second beta version for eventual submission as an OASIS Committee Draft.
2 Intended Use of the Small Business Subset
The needs of small businesses with regard to implementation of electronic trade have long been a challenge to standards bodies. It was hoped that changes to the format of document and data exchange might provide what is required to allow greater interoperability beyond single businesses and their trading partners. In particular, the popularity of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) has heightened this hope.
However, problems arose with the growing multiplicity of different XML document formats and vocabularies. The Universal Business Language (UBL) was developed as a central hub vocabulary to which other formats can be mapped.
A significant goal of UBL was to reduce the cost of its implementation to that which is affordable by even relatively small businesses. However, the size and complexity of the business documents provided by UBL has been cited as a possible barrier to its adoption. To address this concern, the UBL TC has chartered the Small Business Subcommittee (SBSC) to create a commercially acceptable minimal subset of UBL tailored to the needs of small businesses and designed to be as easy as possible to implement.
The aim of the UBL Small Business Subset (SBS) is to identify those elements of each UBL document model that should be included in small business implementations. Specification of this subset also indicates to businesses implementing complete UBL documents the minimal components required by a small business. To allow trading parties to unambiguously state adherence to the subset where one or more of the partners does not wish to use a full implementation of UBL, this specification provides references (in the form of URIs) that can be included in trading partner agreements.
This SBS package provides a preliminary version of the UBL 1.0 SBS document models. The purpose of this release is to seek feedback and pilot implementation experience prior to its submission for approval as an OASIS Committee Draft.
It is intended that any party wishing to limit their implementation to the Small Business Subset (SBS) should indicate this in their document URIs, identifying the SBS schemas they will use. These URIs will reference the precise version of each subset schema. [Is this correct?] Parties exchanging UBL documents with SBS users SHOULD NOT require the SBS user to process any part of a document not defined in the SBS models. Note that this does not mean that business data external to the subset cannot be included in a message – only that it MAY be ignored by the SBS user. Parties exchanging documents with SBS users SHOULD ensure that their documents satisfy every part of the SBS model.
An additional use of the Small Business Subset is as a specification for software development. Software providers may wish to begin UBL support by implementing the SBS rather than the full set of UBL document models. This reduces the initial size of a development project yet still supports interoperability between smaller businesses. Extension of software to support a full UBL implementation will then be possible at a later stage.
The normative definition of the Small Business Subset for each of the eight UBL 1.0 document types is specified in an XML document that uses XPath to summarize all the possible elements and attributes that can validly appear in instances of that document.
These XPath lists are located in the
xpaths/xml/XPath/ directory
of this package, as listed below.
- Order
- xpaths/xml/XPath/Order-XPath.xml
- Order Response
- xpaths/xml/XPath/OrderResponse-XPath.xml
- Order Response Simple
- xpaths/xml/XPath/OrderResponseSimple-XPath.xml
- Order Change
- xpaths/xml/XPath/OrderChange-XPath.xml
- Order Cancellation
- xpaths/xml/XPath/OrderCancellation-XPath.xml
- Despatch Advice
- xpaths/xml/XPath/DespatchAdvice-XPath.xml
- Receipt Advice
- xpaths/xml/XPath/ReceiptAdvice-XPath.xml
- Invoice
- xpaths/xml/XPath/Invoice-XPath.xml
The XPath lists provided in this package are the only normative representation of the UBL 1.0 Small Business Subset.
Each of these document subset definition files contains its own Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The URI is located in the subset definition file in the contents of the attribute named "id" of the root element named "xpath".
These URIs can be used as namespaces to identify the SBS version of each document in trading partner agreements and business process specifications. Typically this would be in addition to the appropriate UBL 1.0 namespace.
In the same directory is a Compact RelaxNG (RNC) schema, xpath.rnc, and a W3C (XSD) schema, xpath.xsd. These schemas define the structure of the subset definition files. The subset definition files effectively contain XPaths for all subset elements and attributes. Actual XPath strings can easily be produced from these files by running the "xpath.xsl" XSLT 1.0 stylesheet provided in the same directory.
Files in this package other than those described in the section "Normative Material" are provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered normative.
Model files are provided in the format of the data model
spreadsheets in the UBL 1.0 Standard, with an extra
column R in which "Y" indicates that the
corresponding UBL Business Information
Entity (BIE) is included in the Small Business Subset. These spreadsheets are
located in the model/
subdirectory. Note that for each document spreadsheet a separate copy of the
Reusable spreadsheet is required since the subset of reusable BIEs is different
for each SBS document
model. [Might it be more useful to have just one
Reusable spreadsheet with an SBS Y/N (or checkmark) column
for each document type? Just a thought.]
The subdirectory named UBL-1.0-Schema-aligned-CCTS-spreadsheets [Change directory name to
remove spaces as shown] contains UBL 1.0 aligned CCTS datatype spreadsheets to complete the model
for those who might wish to generate other subset artifacts from the spreadsheets.
Valid UBL example instances of each UBL 1.0 document type conforming to the Small Business Subset
are provided in the directory
xml/filled-examples/. These are provided both with fully qualified URLs
(located in the directory xml/filled-examples/with-urls/) and with the names
of the XSD schema files only (located in
the directory
xml/filled-examples/without-urls/).
Again for information only, template instances of UBL documents conforming to the Small
Business Subset but empty of data and therefore not truly conformant as UBL instances
are located in the directories xml/empty-templates/with-urls/ and
xml/empty-templates/without-urls/.
A readme.txt file in the directory xpaths/
includes part of this narrative [which now needs to be
revised] and
a short note about how the HTML, XML, and text files were generated.
Finally, this package contains XML synthesized instances, HTML files, and text files
which each contain a list of all possible XPath addresses that are valid
for instances of a particular document model. These are
located in the xpaths/
directory, which is subdivided into xpaths/xml/instance/ for XML synthesized
instances, xpaths/html/ for HTML listings of
the subset XPaths, and
xpaths/txt/ for text listings of the subset XPaths.
NOTE: It is not the role of these XPath expressions to change any normative specification or schema of UBL 1.0. They merely summarize those components of UBL 1.0 that make up UBL-1.0-SBS. Any instances conforming to the SBS profile will validate against official UBL 1.0 W3C schemas, so there is no need for a new expression of the UBL schemas.
Users of UBL-1.0-SBS-1.0 can choose to use any expression of constraints they wish to specify the subset profile as a supplement to the official UBL schemas used for position and cardinality of the components of an instance. [I don't understand the last part of this sentence.]
The HTML and text XPath files list the XPath addresses and cardinalities of all elements and attributes in the SBS. Element paths without a trailing "/" character indicate an element with text content; element paths with a trailing "/" character are "branches" with element content, indicating that the XPath expression is not complete. [Is that right? I couldn't clearly understand the original regarding this last part.]
The XML XPath files contain the raw [word missing here] from which the other files are generated. Two expressions of constraints are included: the normative RNG expression and the informative XSD expression. The XSD expression lacks some co-occurrence constraints that are indicated in the RNG expression.
When the HTML files are rendered using Internet Explorer, clicking on any XPath address will copy that address to the clipboard, allowing one to paste the address into any document without having to retype the entire string. [This is not true on my system; XP (as currently autopatched) disables the feature as a security risk. In general, we should avoid using proprietary features; if it doesn't work in all conforming HTML browsers, it shouldn't be in the release.] If you need to just copy and paste the XPath address, then use the text files, as the HTML files include Unicode zero-width-space characters after each "/" to promote sensible line-breaks in narrow presentations. The HTML files are commented with some rendering troubleshooting guidelines.
The namespace prefixes adopted for documentary purposes in these files are interpreted as follows (note that there is no obligation to use these prefixes in UBL documents):
xmlns:cac="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:CommonAggregateComponents-1.0" xmlns:cbc="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:CommonBasicComponents-1.0" xmlns:co="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:OrderChange-1.0" xmlns:da="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:DespatchAdvice-1.0" xmlns:in="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:Invoice-1.0" xmlns:po="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:Order-1.0" xmlns:ra="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:ReceiptAdvice-1.0" xmlns:ro="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:OrderResponse-1.0" xmlns:rs="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:OrderResponseSimple-1.0" xmlns:xo="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:OrderCancellation-1.0"
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