RE: External ID draft

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

David RR Webber:
>This stuff is like teaching ancient greek at times. 
[...]
>and what is an
>ontology anyway - and why do I need it?'.

Ontology is almost the same as semantics:  the
concepts and relationships involved in an area of
knowledge, in this case business. 

If you think of a dictionary consisting of all the
concepts, an ontology or semantic model also
defines all the relationships between all the 
concepts.  For example, how buyers relate
to sellers, how orders relate to fulfillment events,
etc.

At the risk of defending a six-bit word, a well-done
business ontology can make ebXML simpler and
easier to understand and expressable in normal
business language.

And of course a badly-done ontology can make
things worse.

I think we can do it well, but it won't be done for
ebXML V 1.0.

Regards,
Bob Haugen