Does UBL becomes a real, serious Standards Body

["Michael Dill" <dill2@gefeg.com>]

Dear all,
the increased number of new documents, which apparently will become part of
the next UBL release, gives me some concerns.

1. The minor one is the issue how and whether this will be still mergeable
with any CEFACT work. Here I'm not aware of a real progress.
- Gives the negotiation on the political level some hope that this merger
issue will be closed?
- Mark announced at the closing plenary the last CEFACT Forum, that ATG are
working on the NDR issue. Does this need to be solved before or after the
political and organization issues the UBL TC management is certainly
discussing with the CEFACT Forum Management?

2. If there is either the intention not to merge with CEFACT or a low
probability that this will happen, then my major concern is that there is
IMO a need to have proper submission procedures for new library objects,
which includes the localization committees, the tracking and tracing of
change requests, the intermediate publication of approved stuff etc etc.

Maintenance issues are often boring and time consuming. Geniuses tend to
ignore this aspect or to leave this to others. Is there any chance to have
teh necessary full time resources?

3. In the case of a release of so many new documents within a UBL version,
it will be important to solve the issue with the stand alone BBIE directly
under the document level. They are potentially redundant and another
solution should be found by using ASBIEs instead.
E.G. Order Cancellation. Copy. Indicator and Order Change. Copy. Indicator,
which have the same definition (BTW in order to be fully CCTS compliant,
they should not have!). Another aspect is, that often several documents have
to have the same substructures in order to meet the requirements of the
business data flow. How to gurantee this without any CCTS reuse?
Whenever a definition needs to be changed, this has to be done in several
documents, currently just 8, later 60+ - this is simply not manageable
without either unnecessary work and errors or a new redundancy-free
approach.
Otherwise we will have an increasing number of 'de facto' semantic
structures i.e. same semantic data with no links between them. This is a
serious modeling issue to me.

best regards,
Michael Dill