Notes on the ATG2 meeting in Washington

For use in tomorrow's Atlantic TC call.

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NOTES ON THE ATG2 MEETING IN WASHINGTON

The ATG2 meeting took place the week of 15 January 2007 at SAP
offices in Washington, DC.  Organizations represented included:

   SAP
   Oracle
   Sun Microsystems
   U.S. Navy
   OAGI
   STAR
   AIAG
   X12 (informal observer)
   OASIS (UBL)
   GS1
   RosettaNet
   ACORD

UBL was represented by UBL chair Jon Bosak, who attended only the
plenaries and the work sessions devoted to NDR revision.

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UBL INPUTS

UBL submitted the following methodology papers:

   THE ARGUMENTS FOR EXTENSIBLE CONTENT.pdf
   UBL-codelist-methodology-0.8-D2-20070102-2240z.zip
   gkholman-ubl-modeling-0.4.zip

And the latest UBL NDRs:

   prd-UBL-NDR-2.0.pdf

And a copy of the UBL 2.0 Standard:

   os-UBL-2.0.zip

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SALIENT ITEMS FROM THE OPENING PLENARY

 - ATG2 has no mailing list of its own but rather uses the ATG
   mailing list.  The ATG list is managed by the UN; there is no
   publicly visible archive, and all requests to be added to the
   list must go through the ATG chair.  The ATG web site is hosted
   by CEN.

 - CCTS version 2.01 is the basis for NDR 2.  CCTS version 3
   should be available in February.  NDR 3 will be based on CCTS
   3.  The datatype work that used to be part of CCTS is being
   extracted out into the DT project in ATG and will be used in
   NDR 3.

 - The ATG chair gave as his informal opinion that UBL 2.0 is
   still "in the ballpark" of complete conformance to CCTS3.

 - The UBL chair stated UBL's understanding that UBL and UN/CEFACT
   have agreed that UBL will contribute its work to UN/CEFACT.  He
   observed that UBL is unique in this respect among the other
   efforts represented at the meeting and stated that UBL should
   not be considered in the same category as the other SDOs for
   purposes of the ATG NDR work.

 - The UBL chair said that he understood why UN/CEFACT would wish
   to benefit from the implementation experience of the SDOs
   represented in the meeting in constructing its own next
   generation of NDRs, but did not understand the benefit to be
   gained by the NDOs in adopting a common set of NDRs.  Members
   present replied that user communities were in favor of common
   NDRs and that there was some evidence that convergence on
   common NDRs would promote harmonization beyond what was
   achievable with CCTS convergence alone.

 - The UBL chair suggested adding the following business
   requirement: Keep NDR changes incompatible with the UBL 2.0
   schemas to a minimum to facilitate the migration of the UBL
   installed base to future UN/CEFACT offerings.  This suggestion
   was rejected.

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CODE LISTS

Following a discussion largely driven by UBL and GS1 with the
assistance of Marty Burns, the
following were accepted as requirements for the code list work
(these are from my notes and must be checked against the minutes
of the meeting when those become available):

 - A standard xml form of representation for the publication of
   code lists (e.g., genericode, now under development by the
   OASIS Code List Representation TC)

 - The ability to subset or extend code lists without requiring
   changes to the standard schemas

 - The ability to associate different versions of a code list with
   different locations in the instance document

 - The ability to associate conditional logic with code values

 - A standard way to specify all this in individual trading
   partner agreements

 - Support for code values in both elements and attributes

 - Support for multiple lists of equivalent codes (covered by
   genericode)

 - Support for code list metadata (covered by genericode)

OAGi observed that they have been using a second XSLT
validation pass since 2002.

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OTHER NDR ISSUES

ATG2 briefly reviewed most of the current ATG NDRs to note items
that needed work.  No attempt was made to take notes on these; UBL
NDR editors will need to review the issues matrix when that is
made available.

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RELEVANT ACTION ITEMS

ACTION: Every SDO to contribute two slides on derivation 
[= customization or extension] by the beginning of February for
use during the Dublin UN/CEFACT Forum in March:

   Slide 1: The business case for derivation/extension

   Slide 2: The current approach used by the SDO in meeting the
   requirements

   Slides to be sent to Garret Minakawa
   (), Don Allen (), and
   Serge Cayron ().

ACTION: ACORD and OAGI will write a paper on derivation at the
model and schema levels taking UBL inputs into consideration.

ACTION: All SDOs to review the current ATG NDR "hybrid" approach
for local/global in preparation for further discussion.  This
approach was summed up as "declare all associations as
aggregations."  ACTION: ATG2 chair to "distribute ATG2 minutes
elaborating on the hybrid approach."

ACTION: UBL NDR editors to review the new CCTS typology, to be
forwarded by the ATG chair.

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MISCELLANEOUS

 - The UBL chair suggested that ATG2 use the NDR authoring format
   created by the Quality of Design team at NIST.

 - ATG message 249 from Garrett looks like something that PLB
   needs to review.

 - ATG2 will be working again in Dublin at the UN/CEFACT Forum
   meeting.

 - The next interim ATG2 meeting is tentatively set for the week
   of 25 June 2007 at GS1 offices in Princeton (NJ).

 - One-hour NDR working calls will be held every Thursday at 16:00
   UTC (11:00 EST) beginning the week of 29 January [my notes say
   "next week," which would be the week of 22 January, but I don't
   think that this is correct].  Core Data Type calls will be held
   every Tuesday at 15:00 UTC (10:00 EST) beginning 30 January.

 - ATG2 passed the following resolution for input to the next FMG
   meeting [this is the wording I recorded; the final submission
   may differ slightly]:

    - [ATG2 is] Concerned with the isolation of the UNeDocs
      project in relationship to the ODP and the Forum workflow.

    - Especially the fact that UNeDocs publishes XML (schemas and
      code lists) that has not been processed by ATG2 and does not
      conform to the XML NDR.

    - FMG should direct TBG2 to ensure that UNeDocs conforms to
      the workflow procedure and agreed technical specifications
      of UN/CEFACT.