UBL Lite name change - to UBL Small Business Subset

["Stephen Green" <stephen_green@bristol-city.gov.uk>]

Greetings UBL-Dev Folks,

Just to inform that there has been progress with the subset
perviously known as UBL Lite. It will have a full set of UBL
documents (one missing at present is Order Change but
hopefully to be remedied soon) and a new means of 
definition as well as a new name.

The new name is to be UBL 1.0 Small Business Subset (plus
subset version number). An abbreviation would be UBL SBS 
but if other subsets follow there may be more need for use of 
the full name.

The new means of definition is a set of XPaths for all elements 
and attributes of each document. Version 0.4
(hopefully to become 1.0 on approval) is found at

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-hisc/200501/zip00000.zip

A few changes of note are:-

Each document uses its own set of common library
components so these can be different say for an Order
as for an Invoice. This radically reduces the possible size
of each document. There are only about 120 elements
and attributes in a typical document compared with some
8 to 10,000 possibilities in a completely general UBL document.
It would mean that a set of spreadsheet subset specs would require
a separate 'Reusable' spreadsheet or table for each document
besides the document spreadsheet or table.

The Order now includes details for a credit card (or other card)
payment means.

The Invoice lines have OrderLineReference to allow for three-way
matching with Order, etc. This could be omitted since the rule
is that subset entities SHOULD NOT be ignored rather than 
MUST NOT be ignored. A reminder here that the other rule is that
entites outside the subset may be used but MAY be ignored by
the receiving application (unless agreement has been reached 
otherwise) for subset compliance. This allows reduction in the
complexity of compliance without reducing the opportunities
for adding complexity where mutual agreement allows.

The ReceiptAdvice and DespatchAdvice do add complexity
to the other documents a litlle in that they require more
line level data (which is an aspect of their normal function).
This is mainly the addition of OrderLineReference to the
Invoice since it has already to be present in the Advice
documents (and some would argue that it is an important
part of even a simple order/invoice electronic trading
process though not all small business apps support it).

There is now also minimal DeliveryTerms in the Order/OrderResponse
and minimal PaymentTerms in the Invoice.

For details of cardinality, of course, one has to refer to the
full UBL Schemas and none of the subsets alter the
cardinalities.

Please see also 

for background on developments:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl/200501/msg00040.html

and

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-dev/200409/msg00033.html

Comments welcome

All the best

Stephen Green