ubl — archive

[Ken Holman <gkholman@cranesoftwrights.com>]

At 2006-08-14 13:22 +0800, Tim McGrath wrote: >G. Ken Holman wrote: >>At 2006-08-13 10:49 +0800, Tim McGrath wrote: >>>no business rules are used to guide this model >>>and as such it is fairly meaningless. no-one >>>could use this model as-is. consider the >>>waybill - it only decribes a shipment and no parties involved! >>Does that mean that it doesn't have sufficient >>mandatory elements for a UBL document type? >This is my (and sylvia's) point, there isn't >really a minimal set of mandatory elements that >would in their own right constitute a meaningful (and/or legal) exchange. >... >In this situation stating here are my shipment >details in isolation, may be technically valid but not much use. >... >OK, I see now your vision of Open-UBL. This is >another part of the customization puzzle we >should consider in the approach we are >defining. You are proposing a minimal subset >(or what i would call a "core pattern") for each >document type. An approach Bob and I refer to as >"Core plus Contextualization" in our [highly acclaimed] book. Actually, I'm trying to state something stronger: that our choice of the minimal mandatory set of information items in the document type be considered the "core" that conveys at least enough information for parties to continue on "out of band" and complete the transaction. It could be that the document types are there now ... I wouldn't know so that is why I published what is there right now and asked the question of the committee as a comment in the process ... but if other comments are sufficient to warrant a change in the schemas, it might be worthwhile to review the minimum mandatory elements to see if something can be changed to flesh out the core for some of the document types. >However i suspect what actually constitutes this >"core" or miminal subset, cannot be >automatically derived from our models or >schemas. It seems to me more like another SBS-type project. I'm of the opinion this is a TC decision of minimum mandatory elements because the non-XML'ers out there who use UBL may be (will be?) tempted at times to use the absolute minimum "just to pass the schema validation" without regard for completeness. Think of the techie who has been told by his boss: "make this document pass" ... I can easily picture that as soon as he has used enough information items such that there are no schema problems, he will believe that he is done. While I *totally* agree that users should choose how much of UBL makes sense, choosing an SBS suite of optional elements, or your suggested "core" suite of optional elements, I also believe there will be a class of user out there who believe that they have done "enough" if their instance validates against the document model. But I do not believe this should delay the release of UBL 2.0 ... if there are no other changes in the comments that trigger a new review, then these comments of mine aren't important enough to do so themselves. However, if for other reasons there is going to be the need for another review, this would give us a chance to consider the 31 reports of the minimum information items for each document type and make a few more items mandatory so that a minimal instance of each document type isn't missing an obvious piece of information that has been overlooked during development. That is pretty subjective too ... since I am relying on "out of band" completion of the transaction while using a minimal instance to convey the essentials of the transaction, the out of band stuff would be that that the receiver can deal with (including static details about the sender; after all, I'm assuming they know with whom they are dealing) without missing any transient details specific to just the transaction. I suppose that would be the distinction: assuming that I know the sender (because that is why I've engaged this special mode of operation), I can assume the static information that is true about the message across all messages from the sender ... what the minimum information in the instance would be would be that which is specific to the transaction that the receiver cannot assume in order to complete the transaction out of band. I hope this is considered helpful and not distracting. It came to mind when I was trying to "just make the dang instance validate" for one of my localized tests, which led me to create the XPath report (so I wouldn't have to look in the XSD schemas), which directed me on how to do so by enumerating the minimum mandatory elements. I then realized this mindset might not be all that uncommon, having witnessed it in publishing, where technologists might try to take such shortcuts in e-commerce ... they could then blame the UBL TC for not making the mandatory minimum elements sufficiently descriptive to still be actually useful. While I would like to believe in the ideal that new users of XML are anxious to learn how to do things properly, I've seen otherwise. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken -- UBL/XML/XSLT/XSL-FO training: Vårø, Denmark 06-09-25/10-06 World-wide corporate, govt. & user group UBL, XSL, & XML training. G. Ken Holman mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com Crane Softwrights Ltd. http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/o/ Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0 +1(613)489-0999 (F:-0995) Male Cancer Awareness Aug'05 http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/o/bc Legal business disclaimers: http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/legal