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Subject: Transition Statement and ways forward
Dear All, please find enclosed some thoughts. regards Michael Dill A - UBL as an ISO standard ISO TC154 has released all the ebXML documents. Consequently it would be the right addressee for further documents. re ISO TC154: As far as I know OASIS is a A liaison member and as such OASIS can submit to ISO, whatever OASIS wants to. All, what I said was: 1. The votes are votes of P-member countries, and it would be a politically interesting signal, not to have a positive vote of the country, where OASIS is incorporated. This simply requires to talk with the U.S. delegation first. 2. A Head of Delegation of a country has to vote in behalf of the national responsible body, independent what his personal opinion is. In other words, he has to follow the decisions of the national body. 3. Therefore I had to make clear, that any statement in the transition discussion is not an expression of the opinion of the German Delegation. Your assumption, that the German Delegation oppose, is nothing, what I can share. There isn't any opposition, because there has not been any discussion. B - ISO and content standards (vs. methodologies). What I pointed out earlier, is that ISO TC154 approved among others not only the ebXML stuff and the EDIFACT Syntax, but also the TDED and (at least parts of) the UN Layout Keys. I.e. they are mostly methodology standards, but somewhere also content oriented stuff. It is worth to explore, what ISO could do under the given circumstances, where the electronic successors of the 'old' paper oriented UN Layout Keys have to have a structure, therefore tags/names etc. C - Increased complexity requires maintenance resources and as I've mentioned before, that the maintenance of any submission to ISO is definitively an issue. The work to update the TDED was really huge, and I still admire the investment of time, which has mostly done by Margaret Pemperton and Sue Propert. Apparently, the membership rules require a certain participation to be a voting member. UBL has probably 13 voting members as of the UBL website, where 7 are individual ones. Given this experience, I feel it is quite normal to ask, which resources will be available to do a certain maintenance. And maintenance and extension will be necessary. UBL is going to go the same path, as EDIFACT, X.12, OAGi, RosettaNet and others already went long before, i.e. both to extend the data and to restrict them by building subsets (key word: EDI Lite). This will make the stuff more complex and requires more resources than ever before. D - schema focus UBL is schema focussed - the normative stuff are the schemas, whatever normative means here, and UBL uses the UBL NDR. These NDR meet requirements as well as other schema languages meet other requirements, e.g. I think that XBRL has its own merits and target users. Also, there are other payload syntaxes, RelaxNG, X12 etc. If we agree that there will be several payload grammars on the market and no single solution, then we have to look how to organize interoperbility between them. This is what the core components concept probably has been developed for. Then the focus of UBL has to move and has to include models too. I agree, that UBL has to serve the market, where many people, especially starters, just want to have schemas in their hand. At the same time, it is quite clear that a model based approach meets the needs of the more complex reality, of governments (e.g. U.S. ), of corporates and supply chaines. Thus models have to become normative and schemas have to become just a derivative for technical implementation and verification, but nothing, what people shall edit. E - customization Established XML standards like RosettaNet and OAGi have hundreds of thousands of objects. Even there users ask for extensions!. This means, that a customization concept cannot exist of subsets and facet restrictions only. On the other hand, the experiences of extensible XML standards seem to be that is is very difficult to establish interoperability, where users extend stuff themselves. ISO 15000-5 CCTS as a semantic driven methodology looks as well as other related approaches like ISO 20022 for a refinement mechanism, which allows to customize by - technically - an extension and - semantically - a restriction. But again, this is a customization on model level and requires Customization Guideline documents and standards. Also: among others the absence of any normative document how to reuse the content of the UBL spreadsheets as real models makes it impossible to reuse them like an imported schema, which would allow to develop a migration concept, where users do not loose a part of their work whenever they upgrade. As a result, a UBL compliance will be given, if a user reuse the model library and folloows the rules of the model customization guideline. F - Neither UBL nor CEFACT has currently any ontology standard document how to build Core Components and BIE in a consistent manner, which reflects a greater number of typical business situations, including. People like Anders Tell noted this quite early. This is another area, where the experiences of UBL are valuable for global standards. all the best Michael Dill -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: jon.bosak@sun.com [mailto:jon.bosak@sun.com] Gesendet: Samstag, 13. August 2005 23:54 An: jon.bosak@sun.com; ubl@lists.oasis-open.org Betreff: Re: AW: [ubl] Transition Statement [dill2@gefeg.com:] | OASIS is US based and thus it would be not favorable, if CEFACT or UBL | put a proposal forward and the US Delegation for ISO voted NO. OASIS happens to be incorporated as a nonprofit in the U.S., but it is an international organization; see the members lists at http://www.oasis-open.org/about/index.php http://www.oasis-open.org/about/contributors.php OASIS is not a U.S. national standards body and has no closer a relationship with the U.S. delegation to TC 154 than it has to any other delegation to TC 154. If what you mean is that it would be futile to attempt to submit UBL for standardization to TC 154 in the face of opposition from any of the national delegations -- including yours -- then I agree with you, but this is a political reality, not an organizational one. Jon --------------------------- Jon, I regard at least this part of your reply as an rhetoric answer, because I cannot imagine that you assume that I believe in any U.S. control of ISO TC154. OASIS is US based and thus it would be not favorable, if CEFACT or UBL put a proposal forward and the US Delegation for ISO voted NO. It is common and reasonable that the national ISO body is contacted first. The voting members of an ISO TC watch carefully whether a proposal has a good standing, especially, if it is about content payload, where maintenance is always an issue. I remember quite well the big amount of time and resources to maintain the TDED. Regards Michael Dill
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