Re: [ebxml-dev] Can you explain BIE and ABIE?

[Todd Boyle <tboyle@rosehill.net>]

At 02:58 AM 11/13/01, somebody anonymous wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>Can anyone explain Business Information Entity and Aggregate Business 
>Information Entity clearly with real world example?
>
>I could not understand exactly even though I have read the reports lots of 
>time

There are examples of Basic Core Component (BCCs) and
Aggregate Core Components (ACCs?) in the catalog October 31st.

These illustrate the distinction between Basic and Aggregate.
You should have no problem understanding this!  Basic CCs
can only use the 12 allowable representation types. Aggregate
can use other Basic CCs and must include at least one BCC.
Somebody correct me if this is wrong.

The distinction between Core Components and BIEs appears
to be primarily that BIEs will contain many synonyms for the
same essential business concept, with different names that are
more relevant, useful and usable in various contexts.   In other
words there cannot exist any BIE without a context classification,
and, there cannot exist any Core Component having any
context classification.

The Core Components themselves, as I understand, are a
data dictionary of sorts but they are intended to be general.
How general?  Universally general.  i.e. Totally general.  So,
they will result in the high degree of interoperability we all want,
but at the sacrifice of usability, and perhaps ambiguity, in
actual contexts.

The ACCs are are not simple or low level, look at the ACCs for
example-- they are quite rich, quite expressive.  It seems to me,
a user could construct quite a nice basic horizontal set of
business documents directly from the core components--
although they might not see much adoption.  Perhaps the ABIEs
and BBIEs that emerge in the various contexts will be so
superior that they will recover much more than the costs of
managing them.  So I see, really four tiers

TYPES
CORE COMPONENTS (both basic and aggregate)
INFORMATION ENTITIES (both basic and aggregate)
DOCUMENTS

Yeah it's hard to define exactly where the dividing line is, but,
it's there if you look at it long enough!

Caveat: these are completely personal observations and not
authoritative,

Todd