Hello David,
sorry for waiting so long before providing an answer, I was unable
to work fro a while...
please find below my answers:
Il 29/09/2017 16:26, David Goodenough ha scritto:
The business card (as in a piece of card printed with contact details)
is generally a mass produced object, handed out to whoever wants one
with no tailoring to the receiver. It is entirely one-sided, i.e. it
only contains the details of one business/person/organization. Other
sources of similar information would be the headed note paper and
trade or postal directories.
Correct, this reason the UBL BusinessCard is not intended for
instructing EDI / B2B systems.
Inside it you can provide Business capabilities in general but not
Digital capabilities.
The Business Card is intended as a standard electronic version of
the paper one, that can be also used for exchanging data between
business directories or simple yellow pages systems, accounting or
banking systems.
In order to start a UBL conversation it is necessary for the initiating
party to obtain the Party details of the receiving party, but there seems
to be no high level object that can be send just describing one Party.
These might be printed as QR codes on real business cards or headed
notepaper, or made available for download on a web site.
Once you have the partner Party details then the DigitalCapabilities
and DigitalAgreement conversation can happen, and these can also be
used to update Party information should the need arise.
The UBL DigitalCapabilities are the document you need, this is
exactly designed to exchange digital capabilities such as plain old
EDI or new XML capabilities.
So my question is why the BusinessCard has a mandatory ReceiverParty
in it, and why it does not have a DigitalCollaboration object? I
am here looking for a rational or definition objectives. It was
presumably added for a good reason/purpose, is that documented anywhere?
The Recipient is mandatory because of course the UBL BusinessCard is
intended to be exchanged (e.g. to a provider, bank, partner, ...)
In case the Recipient acts on behalf of another party you can use
the BusinessParty information accordingly.
The UBL 2.2 Draft says:-
>>>
2.3.8.2 Business Card
The Business Card allows a standardized way of presenting digital trading
capability information in a form that can be published or exchanged with
trading partners.
Yes, this seems to be uncorrect, I would remove the term "digital"
in the beginning.
The only way to describe digital trading capabilities within the UBL
BusinessCard is by using textual description.
The data structures have been derived from the work of ebXML CPPP, OpenPEPPOL
and other directory services initiatives.
>>>
Correct, but this should be correlated to the UBL
DigitalCapabilities document.
It seems to me that is fails on two counts given this definition, firstly
the lack of DigitalCollaboration object which would enable the presentation
of digital trading capabilities, and secondly that it can not be published
to the world, it can only be exchanged with a trading partner, which should
not be necessary as if they are already UBL trading partners both sides must
already have the Party details for the other and the BusinessCard object
makes no provision for update, DigitalCapabilities/DigitalAgreement does.
Digital trading capabilities are described in terms of processes,
collaborations and transactions.
You must traverse the DigitalProcess information aggregate.
Or to put it another way, what is the high level object that is
used by a Party to broadcast connection information so that others
may request communications with it? I am rather hoping that this
is not a piece of paper!
David
Let me know if you need further support.
Best regards
Roberto Cisternino
UBL ITLSC chair
