RE: Roy's ApacheCon presentation

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