Re: [ubl] Minutes of Atlantic UBL TC call 30 September 2004(correction: should be 6th Oct 2004)

["Stephen Green" <stephen_green@bristol-city.gov.uk>]

Folks

With reference to the minutes from 6th Oct, the minutes record:

     "Stephen described a request for one other thing for 1.1 worklist:
      a batch schema.  This would be used if people typically doing b2b
      don't want to send an invoice or order separately they would
      combine several in one message - as a batch, once a week or so.
      Then there would be this batch schema that would allow you to
      present some of the data, such as tax, as a total of the included
      documents.   Mark stated that this is too far in the realm of ebMS.
      Stephen disagreed, and Mark then suggested looking into the
      Generic Header.  If messaging doesn't provide the functionality,
      and the Generic Header doesn't either, then Mark's view is that
      this is a proprietary, application-specific implementation request
      and should not be addressed by UBL."

I'd just like to report back that the UN/CEFACT 'Standard Business Document Header'
(alias 'Generic Header') happily looks ideal for the purpose (from first perusal),
so much gratitude to Mark for referring me to it and I agree that there would be little sense
reinventing this in UBL since it is available and (hopefully) usable now, together with the
UBL messages and ebMS SOAP Header envelope.


Might I also just clarify another point from the minutes:

    "Stephen mentioned that he has been testing a new version of UBLish
    for 1.0 and it is more consistent with the spreadsheets than what
    we have now.  It is an excellent tool to use as a second round of
    verification on the schemas.  The schemas UBLish is now producing
    are very clean. w.r.t conformance to the spec and conformance to
    the ss model.  See comments Stephen has sent to the list on results
    of the testing.  There seem to be about 5 diffs.  These are not major
    issues, but they may cause some confusion in understanding for
    localization, for instance.  They should be addressed, minimally,
    with documentation.  Even though this information has come in too
    late to address for 1.0, it allows us to document and shows that
    there is enough information being generated by EDFIX to allow others
    with tools to do the same thing."

Regarding the last part I'd like to clarify my point further to say that the fact that an external tool
could be kept up-to-date sufficiently to generate truly conformant Schemas would
valuably demonstrate that there can be all the information available to anyone with time to
read minutes, e-mails, NDR updates, etc to allow this (along with a few e-mail requests for further 
information from respective TC members, perhaps via ubl-dev, say). This demonstrates the
maintenance of true openness in the UBL development process. So the maintenance,
with much gratitude to Chee-Kai, of the UBLish tool would not just provide a valuable QA
of the Schemas and spreadsheets as it has well done in the past but also provide a QA
indicator that enough information continually gets relayed out to developers to enable the
ongoing maintenance and keeping up-to-date of such tools. I think there are many who
would attach great importance to this, though I must say how grateful I have been that
UBL is indeed kept so open and has so much of its information externally avaliable to non-
OASIS / UBL TC members as well as to members. 
 
All the best

Stephen Green