Re: Registry concern with specifying common vertical structures

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

There's a big storm brewin' over in Reg Rep about the PostalAddress
structure in the ebXML Registry. Philip Goatly thinks it's too U.S.
centric.  Robert Adams asked if "there [isn't] an ISO standard for
postal addresses [in the ebXML Registry]?  Shouldn't that be the one
specified?" Philip Goatly suggested looking at EDIFACT.  And Karl F.
Best says to take a look-see at the Customer Information Quality (CIQ)
OASIS technical committee.

But Farrukh Najmi said "[Registry needs] something now. I would be happy
to discuss changes but we cannot leave this to CC since I believe  we
need to depend on these definitions within our model."

Actually - believe it or not - there is an international standard
dealing with Postal addressing - called ISO 11180:1993 Postal
addressing, in fact.   This is the responsibility of ISO Technical
Committee (TC) 154, of which our own Mary Kay Blantz is the U.S. TAG
Chair.  In the U.S. TAG, we periodically come across odd-ball standards
and have a good laugh over them.  Hopefully, that won't happen to ebXML
Now over to you, Mary Kay....

This problem of addressing has been examined repeatedly by everybody and
his brother, and it's too bad it hasn't been any better standardized.
The W3C Working Draft of the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), at
http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/, in Section 5.3.5.1 (Postal) describes a
simple structure for postal mailing addresses.  And hey - it's a W3C
recommendation.  If you can't beat them - join them!  P3P gets around
the U.S. centric "State" by calling it "stateprov."

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

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