Re: [ubl] Commodity code (was: Re: [ubl] Minutes of Pacific UBL TCcall 5|6 May 2008)

[jon.bosak@sun.com]

[roberto@javest.com:]

| The hierarchy is important to group commodities, but it is fully
| listed to let the user select a commodity in a very precise way or
| more generally through its upper group.

I understand; the system strongly resembles the one used in the
U.S. to code employment categories.  But you end up with so many
codes that I wonder what advantage is gained by providing the code
list.  At some point you end up with the equivalent of a code list
to check the validity of integers; you could do it, but there are
easier ways to check whether something is an integer than
providing an enumeration.

| The taxonomy change every year, mainly to include new commodities
| and rarely to add a new group.  The code list version MUST be
| specified when a value is used (NC 2008)

This implies pretty strongly that we would have to issue an update
every year.  As we're not organizationally constituted to stay in
existence forever, I don't think that this is something we should
be committing to do.  I believe that it would be much better to
persuade the issuing authority to provide their annual update in
genericode.

Jon