Re: ISO Topics and EDI Segments

["William J. Kammerer" <wkammerer@foresightcorp.com>]

John McClure is "wondering whether the notion of 'EDI Segments' is going
to be preserved by ebXML's architecture."

It doesn't appear that the notion of a segment will be preserved - based
on the quite reasonable aversion to XMLifying UN/EDIFACT or ANSI ASC
X12.  More importantly, UN/EDIFACT - and to some lesser extent, X12 -
semantically disperses concepts among several segments.  What might be a
"core" component in ebXML ends up being spread out among parts of
several generic segments in UN/EDIFACT.  This is illustrated in the
spreadsheet update I had sent, attached to "More on Finance Sub-group
comments - EDIFACT, BSR, TDED Cross reference," on 07 Jan 2001, at
http://lists.ebxml.org/archives/ebxml-core/200101/msg00042.html. It
shows that information from the "Payment Instructions" aggregate would
have to be "dispersed" among at least the PAI (Payment Instructions) and
BUS (Business Function) segments.

I don't know why the newest catalog - Initial Core Components Catalogue
Ver 1.01 (Appendix A) - has dropped the "Payment Instructions"
aggregate.  But the same type of dispersal would occur for most, if not
all, of the listed aggregates. Unfortunately, nobody saw fit to preserve
in the spreadsheet the EDIFACT knowledge whence the components were
derived.

William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
4950 Blazer Pkwy.
Dublin, OH USA 43017-3305
+1 614 791-1600

Visit FORESIGHT Corp. at http://www.foresightcorp.com/
"accelerating time-to-trade"