Re: UDDI and ebXML (and IBM)

[Ed Julson <ed.julson@eng.sun.com>]

My response does not represent any "official" position of the marketing & 
awareness project team. This is my personal opinion on how to read the tea 
leaves of the UDDI announcement.

First of all, I believe the UDDI spec in its current incarnation provides a 
repository for business information that is complementary to the work going on 
in the ebXML Reg/Rep team. The UDDI repository is more like a Yellow pages for 
business services and includes information about how to engage with business 
partners, once these services have been discovered. Much like URL's provide a 
method to access web pages, UDDI provides a method to advertise and discover web 
services. 

The ebXML Reg/Rep focus is to build a container for the XML vocabularies, core 
components, and business process that are needed for the programmatic support of 
a business transaction or document exchange. I think of this as the plumbing 
layer that contains the working data set that enables automated data 
interchange.

It's conceivable that UDDI could evolve to a point where there is overlap in 
functionality or the design center for ebXML Reg/Rep. In fact, I think we should 
be open to the possibility of incorporating UDDI into our Reg/Rep solution. 
However, this is best left to the Reg/Rep team to debate.

I stongly disagree with your comment about the ebXML death knell. It would be 
naive of us to assume that ebXML is the only game in town when it comes to XML 
standards. However, we ARE the only organization that is developing a set of 
complete,  vendor-nuetral specifications, based on an open process, to support 
electonic data interchange. UDDI is just a piece of the overall solution. ebXML 
provides the whole enchilada.

Ed



> Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 12:09:22 -0400
> From: joe mcverry <jmcverry@americancoders.com>
> Subject: UDDI and ebXML (and IBM)
> To: ebxml-awareness@lists.ebxml.org
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> From what I read about UDDI it is going to do a lot of the same things
> as planned for in ebXML.
> 
> I'm a bit confused.  I've been getting mail from the ebXML list server
> for some time now and from the postings it seems that IBM was a big
> proponent of ebXML.
> 
> Does IBM have a conflict of interest with the two "competing" standards?
> 
> Do I hear the death knell for ebXML?
> 
> Joe McVerry
> -- 
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=====================================================
Ed Julson			Sun Microsystems
XML Marketing			901 San Antonio Rd.
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ed.julson@eng.sun.com
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