RE: [ubl] urgent ndr rules question/clarification

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

At 2005-02-25 06:46 -0800, Sylvia Webb wrote:
>the requirements of our customers who prefer
>to use the real modeling features of EDIFIX and not spreadsheets.

It might be unfair to characterize the use of spreadsheets as "not a real 
modeling methodology" ... I have long held up the UBL collaboration 
technique of the use of spreadsheets as a tremendous democratizing and 
community-encompassing methodology.

Consider my experience in other deployments unrelated to UBL:

As an independent consultant it pains me to hear communities of users blame 
my peers for engineering a solution in which the consultant is the 
indispensable wizard who is the only one who understands the opacity of W3C 
Schema (notwithstanding my efforts to proselytize the transparency of 
RELAX-NG).

Schema expression aside, even though RELAX-NG is easier than W3C Schema, 
many communities of users have had far longer experience with office 
productivity tools than with schema expression languages.

In future opportunities I will be sure to try to convince such communities 
that automating the transliteration of an office productivity tool output 
into normative schema expressions will democratize the process and allow 
subject matter experts to participate in the process with more of a feeling 
of understanding, that I anticipate would lead to more of a feeling of 
ownership and commitment to the final result, regardless of how the final 
result is expressed normatively.

This is missing when focusing on the stuff of wizards.

And I will continue to use UBL as an example of such a successful deployment.

...................... Ken


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