Dear Yuri Saito,
Please share my response below with the UNECE Secretariat, the UN/CEFACT Bureau, and with members of the UN/CEFACT Forum as you find relevant:
First of all, let me thank you for your comment to the public review of the Business Document Envelope (BDE) version 1.1 draft technical specification published by the OASIS Business Document
Exchange (BDXR) Technical Committee. On a personal level I am especially pleased to have received UN/CEFACT’s invitation to work on a joint project for a document envelope, which it will be my pleasure to present to the members of the BDXR TC at our forthcoming
meeting on Wednesday next week. I am confident that your proposal will be received well, and I find that we have nothing but common interests in the final work product.
The Business Document Envelope is (as the name implies) an electronic envelope specification designed to carry one or more payloads from a sending party to a receiving party. Whereas the
Business Document Envelope and the Standard Business Document Header might be similar in that they both carry information necessary to route a payload across a network, the Envelope is essentially different from the Header in a number of important aspects.
Some of the principal differences between BDE and SBDH are that the BDE is designed to carry in it more than one payload at a time, it can maintain its content confidential while being transported over a network, and it is entirely agnostic to content and
the technical characteristics of its payload. These are all features essential to the 4-cornered network architecture that we aim to develop in the BDXR TC, and that we were unable to find elsewhere. The BDE specification also contains a number of non-network
related innovations, such as the concept of a “timed envelope” that maintains its payload confidential until a predefined time and date (as is necessary in for example public tenders). After the public review of BDE 1.1 has ended, the TC will produce and publish
a comment resolution log, including our formal and detailed response to your comment. We will of course share this document with you, as well as keeping you informed of our progress on the way.
Over the years, the BDXR TC has always managed excellent relations with the UN/CEFACT. Several members of BDXR (myself included) have at one point or another been actively involved in the
now discontinued project within UN/CEFACT to revise the SBDH specification, and we’ve held joint meetings on the matter at the UN/CEFACT Forum venue in Austria in 2012. When the BDXR TC last year decided to undertake a project for creating a document envelope,
it was out of a necessity to have this component in a 4-cornered network architecture, where we found that other specifications did not fulfill our basic functional requirements, and that projects to develop such specification in other groups had either been
discontinued or in standby for several years. I very much welcome UN/CEFACT’s renewed interest in the project, and I would like to leverage this opportunity to propose that we coordinate a joint conference call with all interested UN/CEFACT and BDXR members
to review options for best moving forward. If you want to coordinate with UN/CEFACT members then I shall do the coordination with members of the BDXR TC. Alternatively, I can also do the coordination with both groups if you prefer.
Looking much forward to your response and to a constructive and fruitful collaboration.
Best regards,
Kenneth Bengtsson
Chair, OASIS BDXR TC
From:
<bdxr-comment@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of Yuri Saito <Yuri.Saito@unece.org>
Date: Friday, May 20, 2016 at 5:09 AM
To: "bdxr-comment@lists.oasis-open.org" <bdxr-comment@lists.oasis-open.org>
Cc: "UNCEFACT-BUREAU-SPECIFIC@lists.unece.org" <UNCEFACT-BUREAU-SPECIFIC@lists.unece.org>
Subject: [bdxr-comment] UN/CEFACT Comment on the draft OASIS Business Document Envelope specification
Dear Colleagues,
Please find below a comment from UN/CEFACT for the public review:
The draft OASIS Business Document Envelope specification seems to cover the same functional application as the UN/CEFACT Standard Business Document Header Technical Specification, SDBH, published
in 2004. As the latter is used for UN/CEFACT payloads and also widely used by other organisations to carry non-UN/CEFACT contents, we would strongly advise OASIS to suggest their members to use SBDH instead. If the OASIS working group found additional requirements,
UN/CEFACT would be happy to host a project to develop a new version or to carry out the work as a joint project.
Best regards,
Yuri
Yuri Saito (Ms.)
Associate Economic Affairs Officer
Economic Cooperation and Trade Division
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
E-mail: Yuri.Saito@unece.org
Telephone: +41 (0)22 917 32 68
Office S-440
Palais des Nations
8-14 avenue de la Paix
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