Re: [ubl] Resolution 10/6/2002: Negotiations with UN/CEFACT

[Jon Bosak <Jon.Bosak@sun.com>]

[mmartin@certivo.net:]

| Jon,
| Thank you for distributing these materials. As per your brief, key
| issues to meeting business needs for the 'user' community as it relates
| to UBL are:
| 
| 1. Momentum
| 2. Responsiveness to your membership
| 
| Are these items driven by priorities of solution providers rather than
| the business needs cited above?
| 1. Lose of UBL brand
| 2. Publicity - ancillary to #2
| 3. Brand marketing - same

A key objective of UBL is eventually to replace multiple XML
business dialects with a single standard, and to do this it's
necessary to market UBL just as one would market any other
technology.  Like many such public-spirited efforts, UBL has
basically no marketing budget, so we have to make the most of
everything we've managed to gain so far in the way of public
recognition.

Over the last year, UBL has developed a strong brand identity
through presentations and media exposure.  Press, analysts, and
industry organizations have a clear idea of what UBL is and what
it is intended to accomplish for ebXML.  Rapid adoption of a
standard ebXML payload syntax will be greatly facilitated by the
preservation of the UBL brand identity.

| With UBL as 'the' standard payload for ebXML, given the global
| exposure of work within UN/CEFACT, can you reasonably expect UBL
| to be designated solely?  A primay goal for ebXML is to enable
| vertical industry to 'plug-in', and the actual payload is not
| constricted and highly available (i.e. to EAN.UCC, SWIFT, OAG
| users, etc).  Is not the UBL goal to have our work seen as 'an'
| ebXML payload?

No, not in the long run.  The number one aim of UBL (as stated in
our charter: http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/charter/ubl.htm)
is 

   To avert a crisis in electronic business caused by competing
   XML business-to-business document standards by choosing as a
   starting point an existing XML business document library as the
   basis for creating a new "Universal Business Language" that
   will be a synthesis of existing XML business document
   libraries.

It is, of course, unrealistic to think that this aim will be
accomplished overnight, and I think it's safe to say that our
goals and our understanding of the problem have evolved
considerably since we started.  UBL will certainly have to live
side-by-side with existing payload formats for some time to come,
and I can easily imagine cases where the existing vertical
standards persist indefinitely.  But if we were satisfied with
having a multiplicity of XML payload standards for business, there
would have been no reason to undertake this project.  UBL is not
about adding yet another payload format, it's about trying to
establish a single publicly maintained standard library that can
serve as the basis for an eventual convergence.  It is the
prospect of furthering this goal that makes the UN/CEFACT proposal
interesting.

Jon