UBL plans (was: Re: ebXML, Hutchinson... ContainerShipment...)

[jon.bosak@sun.com]

[chiusano_joseph@bah.com:]

| A thought: I wonder if this could fall under the next phase of UBL
| (which would be 1.1), for Materials Management. According to slide
| 6 of [1], which is a presentation that Tim McGrath gave in Hong
| Kong in May 2004, Materials Management is one of the areas that
| UBL is planning to tackle in its next phase (unless that has
| changed, which I have not heard).
| [...]
| [1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-lcsc/200405/msg00003.html

The slide referred to lists the document targets that UBL began
with three years ago.  This remains the default statement of our
goals, though if we were to revise this list today, I personally
would give first priority to the document types listed in the
table "Paper Documents Required for International Trade" that can
be found on page 9 of the 2001 APEC study published by the
Government of Australia Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic
Cooperation [2].

Since the UBL TC is not trying to set itself up as competition for
established international trade facilitation organizations such as
UN/CEFACT, however, we expect additions to the document types
we've just released in the new UBL 1.0 CD to come into UBL as
submissions from groups of domain experts.  For example, we have
received and will soon begin discussion of a key paperless trade
document, the Certificate of Origin [3].  The CO contribution
from Crimson Logic of Singapore is based on the UBL 1.0 library
and shows the form in which we expect such submissions to be made.

Joe's reference to UBL 1.1 requires a word of explanation
regarding current UBL status and our plans for the coming year.

UBL 1.0 completed its final round of TC balloting on Wednesday 15
September and has now been submitted to OASIS with a request that
the Committee Draft be placed before the OASIS organizational
membership next month for their approval as an OASIS Standard.
Barring a negative vote or some procedural delay, UBL 1.0 will
become an OASIS Standard at the beginning of November.

In parallel with the completion of the 1.0 CD, UBL localization
subcommittees have been working to translate the UBL data
dictionary and key parts of the accompanying documentation into
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.  All of these translation
efforts are well advanced, and initial drafts either have been or
soon will be circulated for public review.  We are currently
planning release of these translations to coincide with what we
hope to be the approval of UBL 1.0 in November.  Discussions
regarding the formation of localization committees for some other
major languages have also begun, though it is too early to predict
specific deliverables.  Based on statistics regarding the language
distribution of current Internet users, however, it appears that
the four translations already underway, combined with the original
English, will make UBL data elements understandable to about
two-thirds of the world's current online population.  But these
translations are also be expected to uncover ambiguities in the
data definitions and to raise a number of issues related to
differences in regional trade practices.

UBL 1.1 schemas, which should become available in the second half
of 2005, will (by definition) preserve backwards compatibility
with UBL 1.0 instances.  Work items for 1.1 include:

 - A number of issues raised during the development of UBL 1.0
   that were judged safely deferrable to 1.1

 - Refinements and clarifications of the UBL data definitions
   arising from the translation work

 - Additions to the UBL library identified by the UBL localization
   subcommittees as required to accommodate regional business
   practices

 - Consideration of proposed additions to the UBL document set
   submitted by qualified organizations

So in answer to Joe's original question, UBL would welcome the
addition of document types for materials management based on the
UBL library if they were submitted by recognized expert groups in
a form that allowed us to incorporate them directly into the next
release, but we are not planning to develop them within the UBL
TC.

Jon

[2] http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/paperless/paperless_trading.pdf
[3] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/8703/UBL-COO-091.zip