Roberto,
Thank you for your reply. But I still do not understand.
You say that the Business Card is intended as the electronic version of the
paper equivalent, but then later you say that the recipient is required.
You have a basic bootstrap problem here. How do you get the receipient
Party data? Surely if the Business Card followed its paper equivalent
then it would be destination agnostic. And removing the recipient in no
way stops it being forwarded. You already have the separation between the
sender and the business parties.
You say "The recipient is mandatory ... because it is intended to be
exchanged". Yes quite often when you hand out business cards you get
one back, but not always and the cards that are handed over are not marked
for the recipient in any way. The same goes for directories, they do not
contain (or at least they do not have to contain) the recipient's
Party data.
When it comes to the digital collaboration object, these are absolutely
fundamental to UBL and saying that the DigitalCapabilities object is the way
to exchange this misses the point. How can you send the DigitalCapabilities
object to someone when you do not know where to send it? It is a recursive
unresolvable problem.
There has to be a way to start the communications, and traditionally that is
what the business card or directory entry do and they are broadcast objects
not directed to a particular recipient.
To my eyes the text in section 2.3.8.2 is exactly correct, and it is the
implementation of the BusinessCard object that is wrong. And it as you
suggest the second paragraph of section 2.3.8.2 should not be in the
description of the BusinessCard but rather in the DigitalCapabilities
section, why is it there?
If the BusinessCard object is not designed to start the communications,
then what is and why is it not part of UBL? If the BusinessCard object
is not there as a broadcast object to start the process, what is its
purpose? From your description the process starts at the DigitalCapabilities
object, the BusinessCard is useless and thus should be removed from the
standard.
David
On Tuesday, 10 October 2017 00:11:21 BST JAVEST by Roberto Cisternino wrote:
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
