Re: [ubl] Information items in 2-prd2-cd minimal instances

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

At 2006-08-14 13:22 +0800, Tim McGrath wrote:
>G. Ken Holman wrote:
>>At 2006-08-13 10:49 +0800, Tim McGrath wrote:
>>>no business rules are used to guide this model 
>>>and as such it is fairly meaningless.  no-one 
>>>could use this model as-is.  consider the 
>>>waybill - it only decribes a shipment and no parties involved!
>>Does that mean that it doesn't have sufficient 
>>mandatory elements for a UBL document type?
>This is my (and sylvia's) point, there isn't 
>really a minimal set of mandatory elements that 
>would in their own right constitute a meaningful (and/or legal) exchange.
>...
>In this situation stating here are my shipment 
>details in isolation, may be technically valid but not much use.
>...
>OK, I see now your vision of Open-UBL.  This is 
>another part of the customization puzzle we 
>should consider in the approach we are 
>defining.  You are proposing a minimal subset 
>(or what i would call a "core pattern") for each 
>document type. An approach Bob and I refer to as 
>"Core plus Contextualization" in our [highly acclaimed] book.

Actually, I'm trying to state something 
stronger:  that our choice of the minimal 
mandatory set of information items in the 
document type be considered the "core" that 
conveys at least enough information for parties 
to continue on "out of band" and complete the transaction.

It could be that the document types are there now 
... I wouldn't know so that is why I published 
what is there right now and asked the question of 
the committee as a comment in the process ... but 
if other comments are sufficient to warrant a 
change in the schemas, it might be worthwhile to 
review the minimum mandatory elements to see if 
something can be changed to flesh out the core for some of the document types.

>However i suspect what actually constitutes this 
>"core" or miminal subset, cannot be 
>automatically derived from our models or 
>schemas. It seems to me more like another SBS-type project.

I'm of the opinion this is a TC decision of 
minimum mandatory elements because the 
non-XML'ers out there who use UBL may be (will 
be?) tempted at times to use the absolute minimum 
"just to pass the schema validation" without 
regard for completeness.  Think of the techie who 
has been told by his boss:  "make this document 
pass" ... I can easily picture that as soon as he 
has used enough information items such that there 
are no schema problems, he will believe that he is done.

While I *totally* agree that users should choose 
how much of UBL makes sense, choosing an SBS 
suite of optional elements, or your suggested 
"core" suite of optional elements, I also believe 
there will be a class of user out there who 
believe that they have done "enough" if their 
instance validates against the document model.

But I do not believe this should delay the 
release of UBL 2.0 ... if there are no other 
changes in the comments that trigger a new 
review, then these comments of mine aren't 
important enough to do so themselves.  However, 
if for other reasons there is going to be the 
need for another review, this would give us a 
chance to consider the 31 reports of the minimum 
information items for each document type and make 
a few more items mandatory so that a minimal 
instance of each document type isn't missing an 
obvious piece of information that has been overlooked during development.

That is pretty subjective too ... since I am 
relying on "out of band" completion of the 
transaction while using a minimal instance to 
convey the essentials of the transaction, the out 
of band stuff would be that that the receiver can 
deal with (including static details about the 
sender; after all, I'm assuming they know with 
whom they are dealing) without missing any 
transient details specific to just the transaction.

I suppose that would be the 
distinction:  assuming that I know the sender 
(because that is why I've engaged this special 
mode of operation), I can assume the static 
information that is true about the message across 
all messages from the sender ... what the minimum 
information in the instance would be would be 
that which is specific to the transaction that 
the receiver cannot assume in order to complete the transaction out of band.

I hope this is considered helpful and not 
distracting.  It came to mind when I was trying 
to "just make the dang instance validate" for one 
of my localized tests, which led me to create the 
XPath report (so I wouldn't have to look in the 
XSD schemas), which directed me on how to do so 
by enumerating the minimum mandatory elements.  I 
then realized this mindset might not be all that 
uncommon, having witnessed it in publishing, 
where technologists might try to take such 
shortcuts in e-commerce ... they could then blame 
the UBL TC for not making the mandatory minimum 
elements sufficiently descriptive to still be actually useful.

While I would like to believe in the ideal that 
new users of XML are anxious to learn how to do 
things properly, I've seen otherwise.

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

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