Re: [ubl-lcsc] Document instance UUID

[Chiusano Joseph <chiusano_joseph@bah.com>]

<Quote>
What number of parameters must the  processor examine before the
document instances are concluded as the same (ie, is it just looking at
sender, recipient and time, or also the items, quantities, unit-price,
etc, or entire document, which becomes very processing intensive)? If
timing were used for document distinction (the rest of document being
the same), how far apart in terms of timing must the document instances
be in order for the instances to be considered "separate instances"?
</Quote>

It sounds like there are 2 levels here:

	(1) Document (as an entity)
	(2) Transmission of document

For (1), I believe that a set of "key" information from a document (much
like a relational database table) should be used to unique an "instance"
of a document as an entity. For example (speaking very generically
here), if we assume that a PO Number is unique through time, and a PO
can be modified, then the PO Number would (of course) not be sufficient
to uniquely identify the PO document. Rather, we would need an
additional field/element (please pick favorite word) that would signify
"iteration".  So the [PO Number + Iteration Number] would be unique over
time.

For (2), I think the question is: If the same document is transmitted
more than once (in the example above, the two transmitted documents
would have the same [PO Number + Iteration Number]), what are the
ramifications? Are there legal ramifications which would require one of
the transmissions to be identified as the "binding" transmission?

I am honestly not sure of the answer to that.  But if there are no
ramifications (except additional transmission time/money), then I wonder
whether it is indeed an issue or not.

Kind Regards,
Joe Chiusano
Booz | Allen | Hamilton

Chin Chee-Kai wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Chiusano Joseph wrote:
> 
> >>On the other hand, if the documents were to be stored in a registry
> >>(such as an ebXML Registry), they would automatically be assigned a UUID
> >>by virtue of the fact that they are a RegistryObject.
> 
> Thanks for the comments.  Fully agree that real life human
> references to documents require the more familiar short-form
> serial numbers.  As a side note, one of our company trial
> proposals to refer to people using UUID in a project was met
> with no better than  frowning faces from the end-users.
> The idea here is not to have UUID replace any of the IDs,
> but an additional meta-data to facilitate UBL-processors.
> 
> It's fine if the documents are assigned further UUIDs or
> various other tracking numbers within other systems (ebXML
> registry or otherwise) that are meaningful to those systems,
> but my concerns are within the scope  of UBL, there appears
> to be no defined means of saying one document is "equal" to
> another.  To do that, we need a consistent way to first
> address/identify each document instance within the specs of UBL.
> 
> We carried out an XML Industrial Project earlier last year
> in Singapore under the premise of IT Standards Committee
> (http://www.itsc.org.sg/downloads/xip/xip_index.html), and
> performed some trial exchange of document instances under the
> XIP project.  Some of the experience learned from that
> small-scale trial was that when we generated and sent out
> document instances and particularly in close repetition, the
> receiving  processor must decide if they are duplicates and
> transport level, or are genuine separate instances.
> 
> Should the processor look at all pairs of document instances
> to identify duplicates?  What number of parameters must the
> processor examine before the document instances are concluded
> as the same (ie, is it just looking at sender, recipient and
> time, or also the items, quantities, unit-price, etc, or
> entire document, which becomes very processing intensive)?
> If timing were used for document distinction (the rest of
> document being the same), how far apart in terms of timing
> must the document instances be in order for the instances
> to be considered "separate instances"?
> If the document serial ID (eg. purchase order ID, invoice
> number etc) was manually keyed-in (as we simulate some
> local practice for small companies), the chance of ID
> re-use (consciously or accidentally) was not insignificant.
> And we thought it's easier to mandate XIP software to
> generate unique IDs (using UUID) than to mandate end-users
> to check that IDs are unique (which defeats the purpose of
> automation).  It's also a form of "self-defence" mechanism
> so that document instances circulating within XIP were
> "clean" (unique).
> 
> I thought sharing this experience here would be useful
> for a conscious choice between incorporating or excluding
> UUIDs within UBL document instances.
> 
> Best Regards,
> Chin Chee-Kai
> SoftML
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