Re: UNSPSC - and code lists in general

[David RR Webber <Gnosis_@compuserve.com>]

Message text written by "William J. Kammerer"
>Terry further thinks that even the list of UPCs isn't too big to encode
in XML.  Even though there are hundreds of millions of UPCs assigned?
And thousands more are added daily?  QRS alone catalogs over 70 or 80
million of them.  I doubt QRS has one jumbo XML document of all those
UPCs and accompanying catalog information.   And why would I need all 70
or 80 million, anyway?  - I might sell only 400 items.  I can probably
ask QRS for the relevant catalog information pertaining to those items
only  - using an XML query, no less!

I do appreciate Terry's emphasis that ebXML will rely on distributed
repositories rather than one jumbo, global repository.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I agree with Terry - just because William Kammerer can't figure out how
to make this an efficient access path in XML doesn't mean other people
are not able too ; -)

I think William realised this is about information filtering and retrieval
anyway in the later part of his thoughts there!

Clearly though ebXML needs to focus on the horizontal integration
issues and the interchanges - not the specifics of the backend 
storage mechanisms.

DW.