RE: Fantasies

["Gregory, Arofan" <arofan.gregory@commerceone.com>]

William:

I must respectfully disagree.

For years, people have taken pictorial representations of class
relationships and generated DTDs from the pictures. There is a tool (XML
Authority) that does similar things today, and they have talked about
enabling UML. Problem with UML is that it doesn't carry the optimum set of
data for this functionality, but my understanding is that this functionality
is not at all far in the future.

I don't understand what your interest is in ebXML. If you want to use
EDIFACT - by all means, use EDIFACT. But when you take away the ability to
determine semantic equivalence across syntaxes, you abandon the goal of
interoperability that was ebXML's charter at the core component level.

My point is not to agrue the feasability of such things (and I believe they
are feasible, from demos and prototypes I have seen, built by people working
from the ebXML specs), but to get back to my original point. 

EDIFACT gives us a solid set of work in the semantic domain, such that,
rather than try to re-invent it, we need to focus on problems of semantic
interoperability across syntax boundaries.

I don't think this is impossible, given the tools that XML offers us.

Cheers,

Arofan Gregory

-----Original Message-----
From: William J. Kammerer [mailto:wkammerer@foresightcorp.com]
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 1:18 PM
To: 'ebXML Core'
Subject: Fantasies


Arofan Gregory says "contextual definition of core components, and of
modelling those core components" will allow us "to do things that are
impossible today, such as auto-generate mappings between syntaxes or
vocabularies, or to automatically determine where my document
definitions and yours disagree, even though we may have used different
local names for the same bits of data."

Dear Arofan:

Oh, come off it!  When pigs fly, we will.  If you could do that, then
we'd just dispense with standards altogether, and just model both
end-points so they could "talk" to one another.

Heck, I haven't even yet seen anyone take a UML data model and generate
schemas from it -  and that should be a lot simpler.  People tried and
tried to come up with semantic mappings between X12 and EDIFACT and
never did - so I wouldn't hold my breath now waiting for this
mumbo-jumbo of auto-transforming ebXML core components into EDIFACT, or
vice-versa.

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"



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