Re: CSG Answers to Mark Crawford's Questions regarding the UN/CEF ACT Position Statement on ebXML

[Klaus-Dieter Naujok <knaujok@attglobal.net>]

On Friday, Oct 24, 2003, at 08:32 US/Pacific, Jean-Jacques Dubray wrote:

> What are the mechanisms in place, if the JCC does not exist anymore 
> and UN/CEFACT and OASIS do not talk to each other, to resolve this 
> kind of issue? What committee will decide what is possible to do? 
> UN/CEFACT, OASIS?

As is common between inter-organizational efforts, the coordination and 
alignment of work is always done via official liaisons and this has 
proven to work very well; ex, the BPEL TC. UN/CEFACT has a Standards 
Liaison Rapporteur (SLR). If technical issues need to be resolved or 
addressed, the SLR may communicate directly with the parents of the 
TC/SC/WG to ensure actions are taken.

After 2 years of existence of regular phone calls/meetings, the 
OASIS-UN/CEFACT JCC has done very little (to be honest in 2 years of 
it's existence if anything of technical substance) that would address 
the topic of technical coordination. Over a year ago, in a JCC F2F 
meeting in Barcelona, the JCC had a "grand" plan to put in place a 
number of joint technical work items to align ebXML work but the JCC 
failed to follow through for a number of reasons, mostly because of the 
lack of volunteers. The JCC Technical Advisors were over-burdened and 
did not get the help or support from their own groups.

> What about other specs that are intended to be linked to the BCF 
> framework? Does UN/CEFACT imposes the same constraints on BPEL, WS-I 
> or even maybe WS-CHOR?

UN/CEFACT (TMG) will work with any organization that wants to adopt 
(link) to the BCF work. If there needs to be changes to any of our 
work, we are open to entertaining and adopting such changes but they 
must be within the framework of the BCF and not alter its scope, 
objectives and principals.

> Could you explain us in concrete terms what would you, the TMG or 
> UN/CEFACT have done in this instance? Break the ebXML archtitecture or 
> break the UMM / BPSS constraint?

You seem to imply that they can not be compatible with each other. I 
don't believe that to be true. All three BCF principals could have been 
easily aligned from the beginning of the ebXML project, which was first 
envisioned by UN/CEFACT but due to the objections by OASIS, especially 
Sun during the Tokyo ebXML meeting, we were all forced to make ebXML a 
loosely coupled set of technical specifications and remove business 
requirements modeling as an ebXML requirement. It is evident today that 
this forced ebXML to be just technical infrastructure.

UN/CEFACT (TMG) has always said and it will continue to align work 
around the UN/CEFACT ebXML BPSS with the UMM Meta Model as agreed 
earlier this year in our project team meetings. Nothing in the last 2 
years has changed UN/CEFACT's open intentions regarding our BPSS 
roadmap.

Klaus

--
Klaus-Dieter Naujok                         UN/CEFACT/TMG Chair
Global e-Business Advisory Council            Principal Advisor
Business: www.ge-bac.com        Personal: www.klaus.naujok.name
TMG: www.untmg.org                           BCF: www.unbcf.org