I see from Adam's note that there is not unanimity on the
meaning of the UBL elements as parts of a document. this is an
important issue, which will have to be resolved before any
substantive progress can be made formalizing the UBL concepts. (01)
I completely agree that our task is to represent the semantic
content of orders and invoices. But I can't think of any way to
do that without representing the text strings that people use
to record such transaction information. Without some link from
text to meaning, a system using our ontology will have no way to
extract information from business documents so as to interpret
them in the light of the ontology structure. The "content" field
of many of the core components are strings, and it's hard for me
to interpret that in any way other than that these are
supposed to represent text fields in a document. We also
want to represent the ultimate referents for those text fields. (02)
In the proposals I have made I have represented UBL concepts
as abstract text strings, ***and*** created the direct references
(relational links) from those text strings to the things they
represent -- money, objects, agents, dates, documents. I think
that both are necessary. When we get beyond core components, we
will also be creating more detailed detailed representations of
the transactions recorded in the documents. (03)
I am thinking in terms of using these logical structures as quickly
as possible in practical applications. Since electronic business
documents now or in the near future are likely to be represented
by XML structures, I would very much like to know if anyone has
had any experience with or access to XML-encoded business
documents or XML DTD's that specify the structure of
business documents. I don't want to start a new
thread or discussion on this, I would just like to get
hold of such for my own education. (04)
Pat
======================== (05)
Adam Pease wrote: (06)
> Pat,
> As you know, but just for the record, I don't think our job is to
> represent text fields, but rather the semantic content of an order. I
> believe if we represent a particular coding of an order document, as
> opposed to, or in addition to, the order itself, we're going to be
> adding confusion, rather than making a clear recommendation to the UBL
> folks.
> This group has discussed this issue on several occasions. I though we
> had consensus that we would be representing orders and invoices, rather
> than codings of orders and invoices, but I could be mistaken. It would
> be beneficial if anyone else recalls a consensus, so that we don't
> confuse our customers, or spend time revisiting this issue repeatedly.
>
> Adam
>
--
=============================================
Patrick Cassidy (07)
MICRA, Inc. || (908) 561-3416
735 Belvidere Ave. || (908) 668-5252 (if no answer)
Plainfield, NJ 07062-2054 || (908) 668-5904 (fax) (08)
internet: cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
============================================= (09)
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