Minutes of UBL TC meeting 15 August 2006

UBL TC MINUTES FOR TUESDAY 15 AUGUST 2006

Members attending in person:

Jon Bosak (chair)

Mavis Cournane

Mike Grimley

G. Ken Holman

Andy Schoka

Paul Thorpe

Members attending by phone:

Tim McGrath (vice chair)

The phone was open from about 09:15 to 11:25 and will be open

again tomorrow (Wednesday) starting about the same time.

Issue review

TM recorded all the results of this in the issues spreadsheet,

so these are just the high-level bits:

- Issues 15, 23, and 29 are possibly errors that will have to

be corrected before release.

ISS-29: Simple copying error; must talk about this

Wednesday [but note that 29 seems to have been resolved;

see below].

ISS-23: It appears that EF is enforcing a CCTS rule

(truncations of DENs are not allowed when qualifiers are

present) and that therefore the spreadsheets should be

corrected to fit the schemas.

ISS-15: Appears to be a real inconsistency that may have

to be corrected.

ISS-11 also looks like it might need correcting.

- We covered ISS-1 through ISS-15 as well as ISS-25 and ISS-26

(as side effects) with results recorded in the revised

issues list.  We will resume tomorrow with ISS-16.

UBLVersion revisited

GKH joined us in the afternoon, prompting a continuation of

yesterday's discussion of UBLVersion.  We eventually came to a

general agreement on the following two points.

1. It's an error to think of UBLVersion as a report about the

system generating the instance, because a "UBL 2.7 system"

is still perfectly capable of generating an instance that

uses elements defined no later than 2.3, say (and in an

environment with lots of different trading partners, this

will not be unusual).  Rather, the value of the UBLVersion

element (if it has a value) is a claim by the originating

system that the instance will validate against any UBL

schema whose minor version number (within the indicated

major range) is equal to or greater than the value given by

UBLVersion.  So a UBLVersion value of 2.3, for example, does

not mean "I come from a UBL 2.3 system" but rather "I claim

to be valid against any UBL schema from release 2.3 up to

the latest major version 2 release" (because we define a

minor version update as one that adds only optional

elements).  Or, to put it another way, it says "I guarantee

that you will find no elements in here defined later than

the ones found in version 2.3." The same applies to the

elements for profile version and subset version.

It should be noted that the version number when applied to a

receiving system means something different.  The expression

"a UBL 2.3 system" means (or should mean) "a system that's

been set up to validate incoming instances against a UBL 2.3

schema."

2. In light of this, we identified the following two strategies

for providing the desired functionality.

A. Create processing instructions to hold the values of

schema, profile, and subset version, and add an eighth

instance rule to specify their position in the document.

This is the alternative favored by the group, but we

suspect that the unfamiliarity of the construct may cause

anxiety among users (or rather fears by vendors of

anxiety among users).

B. Make the three version elements optional, with no default
	 or fixed values and no value constraints.  We note that
	 option C requires no substantive change to the current
	 schemas (though it might be a good idea to revise the
	 definitions of these elements).  This is the alternative
	 recommended by the group meeting in Montr�al.

Jon