RE: External ID draft

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

<Sandy Klausner>
Alternately, service discovery should be conducted on underlying resource
ontology. Ontology enables a community to define basic terminology and model
shared relationships within a particular domain of discourse and need to be
machine interpreted. Ontology search would provide the means to discover
services based upon navigation of community resource repositories. This rich
functionality is too much burden to place on a registry notion alone. 
</Sandy Klausner>

There are people within ebXML who are working on the problem of
business ontology.  (Sandy Klausner may be one of them.)

Some of us are working with Bill McCarthy's REA (Resource-Event-Agent)
business ontology: 
http://www.msu.edu/user/mccarth4/rea-ontology/index.htm

The ebXML-BP/UN/CEFACT UMM metamodel contains a set of
"Economic Elements" that are based on REA.  We think a lot more
can be done with the REA concepts and relationships, in particular
classification of core components and business processes, and
development of higher-level business collaboration patterns.

There is not been enough time to full develop these ideas in ebXML.
The work will go on in some follow-on organization form.  If interested,
let me know.

Regards,
Bob Haugen