[ubl] Re: Draft UBL white paper

[Jon Bosak <Jon.Bosak@Sun.COM>]

Peter,

Thanks for the comments on the UBL white paper and sorry for the
delay in replying; I've been at the annual XML conference all
week.

[yimpp@cim-oem.com:]

| 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.

I don't think this adds much, and it hurts the flow.

| 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”), ..."

OK.

| 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,".

I'll take the "validate," but I think we have to keep the "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").

Ooh.  Nice catch.

| 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.

My hunch is that UBL can in fact function as you suggest.  But I
think we face enough political problems in selling our approach to
the more theoretically minded without making this further claim
for it.  In particular, I don't think that adopting this as a goal
would have any practical effect on the design of UBL; UBL will
either work as you suggest or it won't.  So while I think I agree
with you, I can't see a net gain resulting from putting this point
in the white paper.

Jon