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Subject: Re: [ubl-dev] UBL for storing accounting data


I have made some comments inline below...

Martin Kleppmann wrote:
> Thanks for your responses!
>
> I did look at XBRL, but I had difficulty recognising anything in it 
> which would be relevant to me. A lot of it seems to apply to publicly 
> listed companies with regulatory reporting requirements. That is a 
> world very different from my own; I consider a company with 10 people 
> and $1m turnover to be big!
>
you are correct XBRL is a financial reporting language - in that sense, 
it complements UBL which is a business transaction language.  to 
trivialize this, you use UBL in your daily trading and XBRL for your 
accounting, tax, securities and government reporting.

> What I am trying to do is really quite lightweight, and I don't want 
> to introduce any more complexity than absolutely necessary. In many 
> ways I even find UBL too heavyweight and complex, but I appreciate the 
> amount of thought which has gone into it, and by trimming it to a 
> subset I think we could make it quite suitable for small businesses.
>
as Ken said, UBL has been down this path with our Small Business Subset 
- you may also find useful subsets (known as Profiles) in the Northern 
European Subset project (http://www.nesubl.eu/), which is now evolving 
into a Europe-wide project. They also have a remit for small business 
users. so you dont need to start from a blank page!

> Some more thoughts/questions/comments:
>
> * What is the patent situation of UBL? There is some legalese on 
> RAND/RF modes on 
> http://www.oasis-open.org/who/intellectualproperty.php -- which mode 
> applies to UBL? It goes without saying that even the remote 
> possibility of licensing fees would be a showstopper for a free and 
> open source implementation.
>
we have chosen the Royalty Free on Limited Terms licensing which means 
there is no  license fee for using UBL (and never will be) .  The full 
statement is in every UBL schema.
> * I think the UBL documentation could do with being more extensive, 
> and in particular more transparent. Ken, the files you provide are a 
> useful reference; I think potential UBL adopters would find it a lot 
> easier though if there were a few examples and a bit more explanation 
> for each element. I may look if I can set up something a bit like a 
> Wiki at some point.
>
have you seen http://UBl.xml.org?  please feel free to build something 
there ;-)
> * If I join OASIS, where do my membership fees go? I'm not used to 
> paying for the privilege of sitting on a committee, so I'd at least 
> like to know that the money is going into something useful :-)
>
It is an administration fee for providing the legal entity that is OASIS 
and its management  and infrastructure. No-one gets paid for working on 
UBL (believe me).  It is a situation where you pay to volunteer your 
effort.  Welcome to the world of standards-making.
> Thanks again for your help. I'll start writing up a few ideas, and pop 
> back here from time to time if I have questions about the meaning of 
> certain UBL constructs, if you don't mind.
>
> Martin
>
>
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begin:vcard
fn:Tim McGrath
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org:Document Engineering Services Ltd.
email;internet:tim.mcgrath@documentengineeringservices.com
title:Managing Director
tel;work:+61 893352228
tel;cell:+61 438 352228
url:www.documentengineeringservices.com
version:2.1
end:vcard



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