Thinking XML: General business Language (UBL)

The XML format used for business is confusing, and the common Business language (Universal Business LANGUAGE,UBL) is dedicated to unifying this confusing domain. Recently, the group behind UBL first released the product for public review. In this paper, Uche Ogbuji for the first time to make a deep discussion on UBL.

As I mentioned in my last column, the general Business Language (UBL) Oasis Technical Committee was established on October 17, 2001. UBL is a document library for commercial transactions, designed from the perspective of small and medium-sized organizations and large organizations. The committee behind UBL (UBL TC) has made an excellent generalization of their ambitions:

The purpose of UBL TC is to develop a standard library of XML business documents (purchase orders and invoices, and so on) by modifying existing XML Schema libraries to incorporate the best features of other existing XML business libraries. The TC then designs a mechanism that generates context-specific business patterns by applying transformation rules to common UBL source libraries. UBL is intended to be an international standard of electronic transactions that everyone is free to use without having to be licensed or to pay other fees.

UBL TC recently produced its first major product: UBL Library Content 0p70 for public review. You can download the review package from its home page (see Resources). I encourage anyone interested in this to carefully study UBL and send any comments to UBL TC. The use of this product does not require royalty payments and all efforts have been made to avoid the intellectual property barriers associated with it. The freedom to use such an important product can have a considerable public interest, and by improving the product we can all get a lot of benefits. The material in this release is not the final form: its final form is expected to be completed in about the middle of this year, and even then it is only part of the final UBL material, so there is ample time to comment on it and to supplement its content. You may want to review recent articles in this column to learn about the general context of UBL and similar initiatives, as well as some of the core issues that drive these initiatives.

UBL Overview

For UBL, the first thing to note is that it is very large and involves all aspects of the content. The initial release is a 5.6 MB ZIP file that contains probably the most common commercial forms (and most likely provided as XML documents): The entire trade process between the buyer and the seller from the order to the invoice. In particular, it contains the following transaction specifications:

Order

Simple and complex order reply

Cancel Order

Send a notification (usually called a shipping notification)

Receipt Notice

Invoice

A set of basic business concepts constitutes the above specification. They are referred to as basic business information entities (fundamental Business information Entity,bbie) and are represented as core component types with a common UBL pattern (kernel Component type,cct). In addition to Bbie, other specifications define their specialized business information entities (Business information Entity,bie), which form a UBL conceptual model that organizes business concepts into classes and their associated components. UBL conceptual models are based on other modeling systems such as the Unified Modeling Language (Unified Modeling LANGUAGE,UML) and entity/relationship (entity/relational) modeling. In fact, UBL uses UML to provide a high-level view of the conceptual model.

However, the spreadsheet is used to manage the substantive details. Yes. Spreadsheet. They are a first-rate example of user-friendly information management. UBL TC found that spreadsheets are the most widely used and easy to manage, suitable for maintaining conceptual details. UML class diagrams are generated from these spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are available in Microsoft Excel format, but I don't have problems when I open them using OpenOffice.org. UML diagrams are provided in a simple GIF format.

Rules of the game

These conceptual models form the basis of an XML schema for related business documents. The process of deriving these patterns is very strict. UBL TC established a subsidiary committee to work on UBL naming and design rules (UBL naming and designs Rule,ndr), which created a comprehensive document (with 73 pages) that contains the naming and general design rules in UBL XML components. The establishment of these rules ensures the consistency of a wide range of XML components included in UBL. UBL Naming rules Example:

The name of the XML construct must be mixed with case (Camel-case) and the first letter is uppercase so that the first letter of each inner word in the name is capitalized, followed by a lowercase letter (example: Amountcontenttype) ...

Examples of XML design rules:

For each complex type definition that is based on an object class, you must define its content model so that it reflects each attribute of the object class as an element declaration, and its cardinality and positioning within the content model is determined by the syntax-independent model details.

The data type attribute in the above document fragment refers to the Schemas (WXS) data type, and WXS is indeed selected as the standard schema language for UBL. As a secondary format, these document types (also referred to as transfer formats (transfer format)) are defined with an abstract syntax notation (abstract Syntax notation number One,asn.1) pattern. Since its inception in the mid 1980s, ASN.1 has been used to date and is the ISO standard for specifying data formats in communications protocols. Using the ASN.1 mode for UBL allows UBL to use a large number of ASN.1 tools, and by using ASN.1 's compression coding rules (Packed Encoding rule), the pattern also permits efficient UBL encoding, which is very efficient binary encoding and therefore very tight Together Indeed, in many XML discussions, the Sage bumped always suggests mapping to ASN.1 whenever the XML is lengthy and suggests binary serialization of XML. UBL TC adopted this suggestion.