UBL Hangzhou Plenary Minutes

[Mavis Cournane <mavis.cournane@cognitran.com>]

Dear all
please find below the minutes of the Plenary session in Hangzhou.

Regards
Mavis
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Minutes UBL Plenary, Hangzhou,  May 9 2005

Attendees: Tim McGrath, Mavis Cournane, Yukinori Saito, Mikkel Brun, 
Anne Hendry, SungHyuk Kim, Thomas Lee, Peter Borresen, Colin Lam, 
Wenfeng Sun, Jon Bosak (by phone)


Welcome by the Hangzhou Acting Chair Tim McGrath and overview by Jon 
Bosak Chair of UBL TC.

We are at a significant point in the history of UBL's development. UBL 
has been a project in progress over the last 2-3 years.

The objectives of the meeting were reviewed. Key is to deal with the 
reports from the localization committees, to talk about other 
localization committees that are working or being proposed, and to look 
at the requirements that are being proposed for the next release, and 
to do some work on those requirements.

The majority of the library content work of UBL has been taken over by 
the UBL Asia Pacific call in the last six months.

The UBL Plenary was welcomed to Hangzhou by Mr Wenfeng Sun our host 
from Chinese National Institute of Standards (CNIS). Mr Sun indicated 
that CNIS was pleased to support the UBL effort and reported that they 
foresaw increasing Chinese participation in UBL in the future.

Jon Bosak presented to the UBL Plenary. He reviewed the near term goals 
of UBL.

One of the key goals for e-commerce is not to replace existing 
practices but it is to allow smaller and medium sized business to enter 
the field of electronic commerce.

We owe a great debt to CNIS for their huge contribution to the Chinese 
translation of the UBL International Data Dictionary.

We will not change backward semantic compatibility with 2.0. We don't 
intend to change the Data Dictionary but we will add to it. There may 
be clarifications or definition changes in the Dictionary. The goal is 
semantic compatibility but if the business experts require better 
definitions then these will not be ruled out.

Mikkel Brun says a major version change would be expensive. It would be 
good to have minor versions for a long time. It would be good to 
continue on minor versioning of UBL 2.0. A harmonized set of Core 
Components is really important. we have to make it clear to CEFACT they 
would be forcing people to change their implementations at an enormous 
cost and makes the business case worse for people implementing UBL.
With this 2.0 change do you think we will be able to maintain the 
announced schedule. It would be important to us in Denmark to maintain 
this.

JB this should be added to the primary work of this week i.e. 
Scheduling. We are promising a CD at the end of the year, and then add 
the months of Oasis process. The target was adopted before we knew we 
were doubling the document set. I am comfortable saying that 2.0 has to 
include these. But how does this impact our schedule. If these document 
types required no additions to the component library and we have the 
schemas, then I would feel comfortable about the deadline. I am not 
sure that is the case, but I don't have a clear grasp of how much 
content work has to be done. The biggest task is getting these new 
document types defined.

MB: Concerning the small business subset, you mentioned it would 
specify what elements are required for small businesses. Will this 
impact what will be required in the normal UBL business documents.
JB: The small business subset is not a set of schemas it is a guide for 
implementors.

AH: is the goal of alignment to have schemas that can be used from both 
UBL and CEFACT.
JB: What I think we need most is to know what your concerns are and how 
important this is to you and what you see as the hidden problems e.g. 
needing a version to be stable for a period of time.

Localization SC reports
Chinese (Thomas Lee)
The translation of the library content is very useful for the software 
UI.
The Digital Trade and Transportation network in HK intends to submit 
their document standard to UBL. UBL components, types and NDR have been 
used but not all the Library Content. DTTN is government subsidized. 
The UBL approach is recommended by the DTTN in HK.

Korean  (Sung Hyuk Kim)
KCALS has withdrawn form KRLSC support.
KRLSC is now discussing financial support with KIEC. KIEC wants to 
accept KRLSC as one of the working groups for the e-document 
standardization. The support of KIEC wold have a positive affect on the 
localization of UBL.
The government supported E Commerce Internet forum(ECIF) will receive 
the draft of the Korean localization effort.
Added a comparison of UBL and CCTS and a comparison with local document 
standards.  There are also guidelines for UBL applications written in 
Korean.
This could be announced on the UBL website.
More document types would be beneficial for generating more UBL 
interest in Korea.

Japanese (Yukinori Saito)
JPLSc has reviewed the mapping study between major Japanese business 
documents and UBL.
The translation of the UBL data types was confirmed by a 90% match on 
essential BIEs.
The significance of the ECALGA project is huge.
They also reviewed the new Oasis IPR document.

Proposed Danish LSC (Mikkel Brun)
Danish adoption of UBL Invoice has been successful.
Next steps will be to ask UBL to have a Danish Localisation Subcommittee
Implementation of UBL order will be done by fall of 2006.

ebXML Asia Liaison report (Thomas Lee)
CCTG group will be building a federated registry and repository for 
their proposed core component library.

TMG: One of the key factors in whether we will meet the timetable is 
whether we have the resources to do it. Since 1.0 there are less 
resources to do it.
It is one thing to build something and it is another thing to do a 
second generation. Without having gone through that cycle and if UBL 
were to go in to another organization there is no blueprint on how to 
do this second generation.

One of things that will hopefully come out of the meeting will be 
resource input.