Re: [ubl-comment] To define propietary business documents

["Eve L. Maler" <eve.maler@sun.com>]

Hello all-- Now that the talk has turned to codes and identifiers, I'd 
like to add one point.  Unfortunately, I will soon be going on a 
week-long vacation and might not see any future additions to this thread 
for a while...

Philip's description of the distinguished semantics of codes and IDs 
below makes a lot of sense to me.  What I'd like to add is that 
sometimes a piece of information has both semantics: a code can be used 
as a unique identifier.  Likewise, a number, a text string, a URI 
reference, or a name can be used as a unique identifier.  The ID aspect 
contributes a higher-level usage semantic (e.g., "you'll want to use 
this ID to retrieve the thing/meaning itself") and the 
code/number/whatever aspect contributes the representation (e.g., 
"you'll want to format your ID this way").  In fact, without saying what 
the representation of an ID is, there is no way to guess the right 
answer, given all these choices.

What this boils down to, for me, is that the code/number/whatever should 
be understood to be the *representation* of a piece of information that 
serves as the identifier *property* of an object class.  This is not a 
new idea, but I don't think anyone has formally made this suggestion on 
the CCTS yet.  I would be very glad to see us apply this idea to our 
modeling, because I think an answer pops out easily in each case.  In 
practice, I think it means the Identifier Representation Term would 
never get used, and that all identifiers would end up with UBL names 
such as <something>IDCode and <something>IDNumber.

	Eve

Philip Goatly wrote:
> Tod,
> 
>    Codes are a shortened representation of something
> 
>    e.g US - for the united states, M for male
> 
>     ID - is a piece of data that uniquely identifies a particular instance
> of something or someone .
> 
>      e.g U167166111B - to identify a particular container
>            on a ship
>           or MM-123-666 to identify a box by its mark or number.
> 
>       An ID can be fairly abitrary, and transitory where as a code within a
> a particular list is unique,  unchangeable universal.
> 
> my 2ps worth
> 
> Cheers, Phil

-- 
Eve Maler                                        +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems                            cell +1 781 883 5917
XML Web Services / Industry Initiatives      eve.maler @ sun.com