Dear colleagues:
OASIS was recently was made aware of a personal opinion article posted on LinkedIn's "Pulse" site by Tim McGrath, making some characterizations about UN/CEFACT and some of its programs. (This note is substantially the same text as we have posted to the article itself, as a comment. Please feel free to suggest whether we also should direct this message to other parties.)
At OASIS, we did not find that article to be productive
or constructive. It certainly does not represent the views of our organization, nor of any of our technical committees.
OASIS, CEFACT and other bodies all have contributed many worthwhile proposed standards into the e-commerce domain. In fact, the original ebXML project, from which both CCTS and UBL both were evolved, was a joint CEFACT-OASIS program.
Our communities should be pleased to see that the many children of ebXML's core components work have advanced, and flourish today: multiple ISO standards; the widespread success in Europe of UBL to support the digital single market via PEPPOL; successful deployment of several other CCTS-related standards projects; and the production successes of SWIFT, OAGi and other large core-components-inspired vertical markets.,
We discourage competitive approaches among SDOs, because collaboration is the natural state of open standards. OASIS and GS1 recently agreed to cooperate on the development of UBL support services. CEN successfully convened a series of "BII" workshops, to assist the European Commission's DSM and e-invoice initiatives, by promoting convergence among standards. Our global community's progress towards collaborative enablement of e-transactions is breathtaking. We encourage all parties to focus on that progress and the positive opportunities from further cooperation.
Kind regards JBC