Re: [ubl] Draft UBL white paper

["Peter P. Yim" <yimpp@cim-oem.com>]

Jon et al.,

The draft white paper is great! .

May I suggest the following amendments. Items 1 through 4 are trivial, but I would appreciate if
you could ponder upon item 5 a bit --

1.  Page 2, last line under "The Vision:.." section
To: "... By lowering the bar to adoption of e-business technology, UBL promises to, for example,
extend the efficiencies of automated ERP systems beyond the individual enterprise."
Change: ", for example," inserted.

2.  Page 4, 9th line from the bottom
To: "... (for example, the fact that an invoice contains information on the “buyer”, and that
“buyer” information includes an “address”, and so on), ..."
Was: "... (for example, the fact that an invoice contains a piece for “buyer” and that a “buyer”
contains an “address”), ..."

3.  Page 5, very top
To: " ... While they validate the UBL concept, neither xCBL nor any of the other current XML
business dialects has established itself as a genuine international standard. The purpose of UBL is
to achieve this standardization."
Change: change "prove" to "validate"; delete the word "however,".

4.  Page 9, very bottom
To: " ... By expressing business process information as metadata, the UBL context mechanism enables
a business to send documents that are tailored to a partner's business process without requiring it
to reveal any proprietary details about its own processes."
Change: I believe the original author meant "without" (and not "with").

5.  Your first paragraph (quoted below) under section "Documents, Components, and Context" pretty
much spells out *what* UBL will be and *how* one sees it being used.
//
   "The primary deliverable of UBL is a set of standard formats for common business documents such
as invoices, purchases orders, and advance shipment notices. These formats are designed to be
sufficient for the needs of many ordinary business transactions and, more importantly, to serve as
the starting point for further customization. To enable this customization, the standard document
formats will be made up of standard “business information entities,” which are the common building
blocks (addresses, prices, and so on) that make up the bulk of most business documents. Basing all
UBL document schemas on the same core information entities maximizes the amount of information that
can be shared and reused among companies and applications."
//

The vision calls for a universal adoption, and an "extend through customization" approach. I would
suggest that we, in addition to the above, also offer UBL as being a reference standard against
which people can (a) "map their existing system to", and/or (b) use as the "intermediary standard"
through which business achieve interoperability between disparate systems and cultures.

Using the human language metaphor, what I am suggesting would be something like:

We tell people that:

   "we are offering up a new language called English, which will have a rich, but then, extensible
vocabulary. We suggest that everyone in the world starts using English as the language for
business; and if they find that they are constraint by the limited vocabulary being offered, they
could always extend it ..."

I am now suggesting that we also consider:

   "we are offering up a new language called English. ... The whole world will benefit by everyone
starting to speak English when they transact business. We can also use English as the intermediary
standard by which the Chinese, Indonesians, Russians and French can translate their own languages
to. Through that, they can start transacting business with the rest of the world without having to
make everyone in their respective countries to learn English."

If you adopt what I am suggesting, we are effectively making UBL the "ontology" of business through
which we hope to achieve semantic interoperability among disparate cultures and systems.

That being said, I would suggest that you consider adopting the above concept into this paper, but
more importantly, into the UBL TC's approach.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks & regards,
PPY
--

Jon Bosak wrote Thu, 06 Dec 2001 22:59:31 -0800 (PST):

> The draft of a white paper on UBL prepared by the UBL Marketing
> Subcommittee can be found at
>
>    http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-msc/200112/msg00009.html
>
> Please review and send comments to the MSC chair,
> jon.bosak@sun.com.
>
> Jon
>
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