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Subject: [ubl-msc] (1) Re: UBL White Paper
Tim said: | Several times you have used the term "form" or "forms" to describe | the deliverables of UBL. Whilst i understand you to mean the | constructs or data structures, "form" also has meaning in the | sense of document and/or web forms. We dont want anyone inferring | that we are designing "fill in the boxes forms". In a similar | vein, the use of the word "component" is a bit overloaded and may | imply connections with ebXML core components. If its not too | techie, i suggest constructs or structures may be a better term. And Matt said: | I agree with Tim regarding use of the word "forms". I understand | that "schema" might be intimidatingly technical. Why don't we go | with "vocabulary"? Because "vocabulary" isn't a straight replacement for "form" and doesn't work in some places. I used the word "form" to emphasize that UBL schemas are literally blank forms for business documents. It's a legal thing. But I recognize the potential for confusion that Tim has pointed to. A word that can be directly substituted for "form" here is "format." For example, here's what we get for the first two paragraphs under "Documents, Components, and Context": The primary deliverable of UBL is a set of standard formats for common business documents such as invoices, purchases orders, and advance shipment notices. These formats are designed to be sufficient for the needs of many ordinary business transactions and, more importantly, to serve as the starting point for further customization. To enable this customization, the standard document formats will be made up of standard “business information entities,” which are the common building blocks (addresses, prices, and so on) that make up the bulk of most business documents. Basing all UBL document schemas on the same core information entities maximizes the amount of information that can be shared and reused among companies and applications. In a UBL-enabled world, companies publish profiles of their requirements for the business documents involved in specific interactions. These profiles specify the business context of each transaction, that is, specific parameters such as the industries and geographic regions of the trading partners. The context parameters are applied to the standard formats to create new formats specific to a given transactional setting. Since these context-specific formats are based on the standard components, interoperability is guaranteed while taking into account the requirements of each party to a particular transaction. I made a lot of other changes throughout to make sure there was no confusion about the meaning of "form." Mostly these were substitutions of "format" for "form," but in a few places I had to use "schema" or "document format" or something like that. "Form" has been left in only in places where its meaning is unambiguous. Jon
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