Customizing Party?

["Nelson, Laird" <Laird.Nelson@jenzabar.net>]

First off, apologies in advance if I've missed something obvious.  I've tried to do my homework to answer the following question, but haven't come up with something that makes me happy.  Any pointers to anywhere are welcomed.

 

We are developing a higher education product that, among other things, needs to collect money when students register for courses.  One of our interoperability requirements is to have another system actually handle the invoicing (which it has comfortably been doing for many years).  We decided both for interop reasons and as a way to jumpstart our own product to export our invoice information in UBL format, with an eye towards its being imported by the accounts receivable system.  So far so good.

 

One of the problems we're running into is the parties involved.  We need to export not just the invoice ("Joe owes $100 for English 101"), but details about the student being invoiced as well ("Joe was born on 6/28/1972"), since the accounts receivable system may have never seen him before, and needs a certain level of information.  What's the proper way to do this?  How do we customize the Party that is taking delivery of the product (in this case, registration in a course)?

 

I see two categories of solutions:

1. Figure out where The Right Place within UBL 1.0 is to do this.  I'm expecting that UBL doesn't really want you to encode *anything* more in a Party than what is necessary for invoicing purposes.  We need, for example, to expose the delivery recipient's (the student's) date of birth.  Perhaps there is some sanctioned way within UBL to do this directly?
2. Export "Joe" in some other format (IMS has some interop specs around higher ed entities), and have our UBL invoice use the Party ID to "point" at that export's identifier.

Again, my sincerest apologies if this is obvious in some document I overlooked; my intent is certainly not to clutter this mailing list or to waste anyone's time.

 

Thanks in advance,

Laird