comments on the architecture document.

[JohnM12659@aol.com]

Comments

1. Introduction - the mandate to create a single global market - this would 
seem to be too vast of an undertaking for any organization. The diagram in 
this section is way too busy and to an outsider all of the acronyms are 
confusing. There should be a section that explains all of the acronyms, for 
example, i never did uncover what UML meant. 

1.1.d. these 2 sentences are redundant. 
 
2.3.e. The juvenile selection of examples names here and in section 2.4.a 
should be avoided as it belittles the overall document. 

2.6.c. Are you sure companies want to display all of this data. Also, the 
reference in 2.6.b to robots.txt should be explained. There are a lot of 
these types of references - as an outsider i have no idea what you are 
talking about.

3.1 Section definitions - if the definition of a message is "any data" then 
what is the difference between a message and a transaction which is described 
as "a single or sequence of messages..."

3.2 The diagram is awfully busy and unclear to the unitiated. Since there is 
no specific explanation attached to the diagram it is hard to know exactly 
what is being presented. 

Overall the document seems well thought out although way to brief. To an 
outsider, it is hard to follow. Also, there seems to be a lot that is still 
undecided - is the purpose of this document to help form a consesus. If so 
then that should be communicated. For example, in 2.4.a, which starts off 
with the phrase "Data element repository references may be placed in a 
DTD...". To me it would seem that a technical architecture document should 
render an opinion on something as fundamental as this. IMHO