Mr. Kumar,
I am Paul Kiel, a consultant to the HR-XML
Consortium (a non-profit consortium of over 110 human resource related
companies), and I wanted to touch base with you regarding the CIQ work you
have been doing. I wanted to share with you some items we have
worked on that are akin to your xAL and xNL. See attached
files.
There seems to be a growing number of
organizations that are working toward similar interoperability
goals. I have heard of the international postal people (the name of the
organization escapes me) getting together to map out a standard postal address
specification. And of course ebXML Core Components is still at
work. Our expertise is of course with Human Resource related
information and not postal addresses, so we will probably be sympathetic
toward standards coming from ebXML or the postal people with regard to things
like postal address. Have you networked with these folks regarding xAL
and xNL?
I had a look at your standards long back. It
is true that your standards are not "global". That is, they cannot handle
postal addresses and
person names from all countries (i.e 227). As such, no
standards in XML have been developed to handle "global" data. This is
the
objective of our work. It is much more
detailed and therefore, is not restricted to just one application of
address, ie. postal. It be used
in variety of applications that use addresses. For
example, data cleansing, customer data quality, etc. The number of examples in
the
standards work proves that the standard xAL and
xNL are moving towards "global" solution. Following are the groups that
are now interested
to work with us and we are talking about it
now:
- OTA, Open Travel Association (more than 150
members)
- CPExchange, Customer Profile Exchange
Group
- CEN (Eurpoean Standardisation Body), that is working
on postal standards in conjunction with United Nations Postal
Union,
USPS (US Postal Services), Direct Mail
Advisorry Board and UN/EDIFACT.
- XNS.ORG
- ebXML (which is part of OASIS anyway).
We are very much looking forward to share our work
with any group. A single standard is the solution. I am sure your group
can
also share our work as your DTDs on postal address and
Names is a small subset of our work.
Looking forward to hearing from
you
Regards
Ram
At any rate, we had seen the work you
are doing and we simply wanted to share ours in the name of open
standards. If you have any further questions about
HR-XML, visit http://www.hr-xml.org.
Regards,
Paul Kiel