- From: Ugo Corda <UCorda@SeeBeyond.com>
- Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 12:35:31 -0800
- To: "Burdett, David" <david.burdett@commerceone.com>, <www-ws-arch@w3.org>
You bring up an important aspect of Web services, which I think has been overlooked for quite a while, i.e. transmitted data and data formats transformations. This seems even more important today given the current trend away from RPC-oriented Web services and toward document-oriented Web services. Initiatives like UBL should be an integral part of the Web services domain, but I suspect many Web services practitioners have never heard of it. By the way, UBL is not the only initiative of this kind. ANSI's X12 Committee is working on something called CICA (Context Inspired Component Architecture - see for example [1]) which seems to have a similar goal. One major difference might be that UBL seems to be primarily vendors-sponsored, while CICA is primarily users-sponsored. Ugo [1] http://www.webservices.org/index.php/article/articleview/735/ -----Original Message----- From: Burdett, David [mailto:david.burdett@commerceone.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 11:47 AM To: 'Anne Thomas Manes'; Mark Baker Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org Subject: RE: Roy's ApacheCon presentation There's also the UBL effort that is attempting to provide a foundation on which a lot of vertical industries can build XML document based interfaces by defining: 1. A set of re-usable "core components" will fully defined semantics and an XML representation, e.g. for names, addresses, etc. - there's about 500 defined so far 2. A set of "base" (my term) documents that use the core components to create XML Schema for commonly used business documents, e.g. orders, invoices etc. These are generic in that they have been designed to work independently of the (business) context in which they are being used, e.g. industry, locale, process, etc. They also have fully defined semantics. 3. An extension methodology that defines how you can extend and/or on the base document definitions to meet the needs of specific contexts, e.g. for the auto, chemical, insurance industries, etc. This way you can have a document instance where anyone can read the elements from the "base" document if you need just them and either use (or ignore) the additional elements added using the extension methodology depending on your need. A good recent overview of UBL is available at ... http://www.sdforum.org/p/docs/events/902/wsSIG10.22.02UniversalBusinessLangu age.pdf ... and the working group at OASIS is at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/ David
Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2002 15:36:06 UTC