Interoperability Summit: Good Intentions, Little Action
by Alan Kotok
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Pages: 1, 2, 3
ASC X12 and UBL Begin Cooperation
Both the Accredited Standards Committee X12 (ASC X12) and the Universal Business Language (UBL) initiative of OASIS talked about their efforts to reach out beyond their memberships and to each other. Both organizations develop cross-industry business messages, and without cooperation could end up with overlapping or contradictory standards.
Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems and chair of the UBL technical committee, outlined UBL's goal of developing a set of Web-enabled business messages within the ebXML infrastructure of defined business processes, collaboration protocol agreements, SOAP-based messages, and standard registries. UBL would provide the payload, consisting of a standard a basic core message extended with UBL's context methodology to meet the needs of individual industries. Bosak said the combination of UBL plus ebXML represents the next generation of EDI: cheaper, easier, allows for the reuse of data, and fits into existing legal and trading frameworks.
According to Bosak, UBL's deliverables, scheduled by 2003, are a set of naming and design rules for XML schemas, a library of XML business information entities (BIEs) based on ebXML core components, and a set of standard common XML business documents, such as invoice, ship notice, and purchase order. The context methodology, for extending the basic documents for specific industries, is scheduled for 2004.
To help with the context methodology, UBL has formed liaisons with the two leading standards organizations -- ASC/X12 and UN/EDIFACT -- as well industry groups in accounting, retail, insurance, convenience stores, electronics, and computer technology.
Ralph Berwanger of bTrade, vice-chair of ASC X12, noted that ASC X12 hosted the most recent UBL meeting earlier in June, which offers an indicator of that organization's new attitude toward cooperation with other organizations. ASC X12 is accredited by the ANSI to develop electronic business messages in North America, which up to a few years ago meant the X12 standard for EDI.
Berwanger said the explosion in the number of XML business vocabularies in the past few years mirrored a similar phenomenon that occurred in the early 1980s. At that time industry groups developed their own electronic data exchange formats, which led to the establishment of the ASC X12 standard in 1983. While ASC X12 had initially held back from working in XML, Berwanger says the group is now fully engaged. Several of the X12 industry subcommittees -- transportation, health care, and government -- have written messages using XML. Berwanger added that ASC X12 now requires that subcommittees writing XML messages to prepare representations in X12 and UN/EDIFACT syntax. ASC X12 has as well drafted XML design guidelines, circulated both within and outside the committee for comments.
This time around, according to Berwanger, ASC X12 will bring its business domain knowledge to the interoperability table. The group realizes that it needs to cooperate more energetically with other standards groups and has established a Convergence and Outreach Task Group (COTG) for this purpose. While ASC X12 created the COTG, this group operates more as a open forum rather than an organ of the committee. The goal of COTG is to function as a "community of equals who exchange practices and process, and collaborate in neutral environment". The results of the collaboration, Berwanger added, may end up in ASC X12 or in other groups.
(Readers should know that I am employed by the Data Interchange Standards Association, the secretariat for ASC X12.)A Little Concrete Progress Noted
The only concrete progress reported since the December meeting involved a registry of standards. In the first summit, participants listed the lack of knowledge about the existence of related work as one of the barriers to convergence. As a result, the group attending the first meeting suggested establishing a registry to serve as an authoritative resource that industry or standards groups could first check before starting comparable efforts.
The group heard a report from Karl Best of OASIS and Bob Hager of ANSI on progress in designing a registry of standards. Best confirmed that standards groups looking for related work or developers seeking to find out what standards groups are doing have few meaningful tools at their disposal. He showed that an ordinary Web search for e-business standards can result in thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of hits with varying relevance and quality.
But Best reported that a project team created at the first summit to work on the registry discovered that a single, central registry would probably not do the job. Instead, the team, chaired by Best, has proposed a common set of metadata that standards and industry groups can use to describe their standards work, as well as encourage these groups to create their own registries.
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Hager, the editor of the team, said that the registry team borrowed ideas from several sources, although Dublin Core seemed to be the greatest contributor. The proposed elements include:
- Designation
- Title
- Description
- Identifier, which can be a URL
- Name of standards development organization (SDO)
- Committee within the SDO
- Source of information about the SDO , which can be a pointer to URL
- Subject, expressed as keywords or reference to defined classification schemes
- Current status, from initiation to published
- Date of most recent action
- Referenced standards, which means normative references in standards
- Standards replaced by current versions
- Related resources
- Format, physical or electronic
- Language, using ISO 639 and ISO 3166 codes
- Rights management, covering issues such as copyright and other intellectual property issues
The registry team will now work on refining the metadata semantics, developing an XML implementation, expanding participation, and launching a few pilot test sites.
