I've been trying track the meaningful/meaningless tag / repository issue on the various ebXML exploders, and would like to offer some thoughts of my own. However, as ive been offline for a while and due to number of threads on all the different ebXML exploders i've not managed to conclude what the current 'state of play' is. I dont suppose someone could offer a summary of the situation, and which options are still options.

STUART CAMPBELL, Operations Manager CMASS
CMASS : Critical Mass in Electronic Commerce

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1) We had a discussion today (again) about what constitutes an ebXML repository. I hope that the attached illustration helps in our understanding of the issue. This is my understanding of how ebXML metadata is differentiated from other document objects.

Go on…rip it apart.

2) Unique IDs. There was also a great deal of talk today about what unique IDs would be used for and how they would be applied. It seems that the consensus was that unique IDs would be applied at the schema level, not the document level. This means that two XML documents which are from the same schema would have unique IDs for a specific tag, but not each content instance. As shown below, the IDs are unique for the tag <FRUIT> but the same in each document instance. (Be gentle now, these documents are only here to illustrate a point, not be full ebXML doc examples!)

Document 1

<FRUIT id=39408JEX98> apple</FRUIT>

</FOOD>

Document 2

<FRUIT id=39408JEX98> orange</FRUIT>

</FOOD>

ebxml-architecture message

Document 1

Document 2