RE: The initial ebXML business vocabulary - A call for a list ofcandidates

[John Evdemon <jevdemon@vitria.com>]

On Thursday, June 21, 2001 8:41 PM Abid Farooqui  wrote:
>
> You are welcome to stay with the old and I'll take the new :).

I think you misunderstood my post - the "old" (as you say) has defined a
highly detailed set of metadata for describing business transactions.  

My original post was an attempt to inform people like yourself that are
(apparently) unfamiliar with the rich metadata EDI has to offer - over 3000
commonly used business transactions have been defined (compare this to any
"new" efforts currently underway).  

While EDI is "old" and possibly not as exciting as XML, EDI did a wonderful
job of defining thousands of business transactions in a detailed manner
(including trading partner configurations).  

> I think you will find extending traditional EDI to work with smaller and
> medium companies much harder than keeping the EDI investement where it
> works 

Usually because mapping from an EDI representation to an XML "standard" is
quite difficult - most of the available "standards" lack the fields (if not
the entire set of transactions) available within EDI.  While this is indeed
a difficult process, many companies have already successfully extended their
EDI infrastructures to SMEs (and others) via XML.

> (within VANs and within fortune 1000) and using new systems to work with
> trading partners that are not going to be on EDI. I believe you will see
> that in the next 4 to 5 years a lot of big EDI users are planning to
> implement part or all their business automation over XML. I think I read
> that in some report very recently. EDI will be around no doubt but so are
> mainframes. They run and they are OK but they are not a solution for
> everything and certainly not the solution for the internet.

Again, I think you missed my point.  My original posting wasn't necessarily
about process - it was about defining schemas for ebXML.  

We can define schemas the hard way (ignore the metadata used to define
e-business transactions over the last 30+ years and start largely from
scratch) or we can leverage the global e-business metadata standards that
continue to be used throughout the world.  I would hope that the choice is
an obvious one.