RE: Roy's ApacheCon presentation

I think they already are ;)

X12 hosted the UBL meeting in June which is **after** the article you
mentioned which was dated last March.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: Ugo Corda [mailto:UCorda@SeeBeyond.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 3:01 PM
To: Burdett, David; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: RE: Roy's ApacheCon presentation


David,

Thank you for the correction. I was trying to rationalize the existence of
the two separate efforts, but according to what you say sponsorship is not
that different. I just hope that UBL and CICA will soon converge.

Ugo

-----Original Message-----
From: Burdett, David [mailto:david.burdett@commerceone.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 2:56 PM
To: Ugo Corda; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: RE: Roy's ApacheCon presentation


Ugo

Although UBL has vendors involved and vendors kicked-off the group, it is
wrong to think of it as an initiative run for and by vendors. Specifically,
UBL has formal alliances with: ACCORD (insurance), ARTS (retail sales),
e.centre UK  (FMCG), EIDX (electronics), HL7 (health care), NACS
(convenience stores), RosettaNet (information technology), SWIFT
(inter-banking), VCA (prescription eyewear), UN/EDIFACT (EDI), X12 (EDI),
and XBRL (accounting). 

In addition, UBL meetings have been hosted earlier this year by UN/EDIFACT
(March) and X12 (June). Both these organizations are working very closely
with UBL.

There are also formal moves for UBL to move from an OASIS to UN/CEFACT which
is very firmly a user driven organization, see
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-comment/200209/msg00016.html for
more detail.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: Ugo Corda [mailto:UCorda@SeeBeyond.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 12:36 PM
To: Burdett, David; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: 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