I submit, Tom's comments are not a blast from the past, but current and topical today based on the history of ebXML.
Yes, semantics. Yes, alignment of meanings. But EDI remains as rigid and unusable as ever, for small business and individuals, and ad-hoc trading. EDI has a "story" for business process integration (TPAs, MIGs etc.) but even today, entering 2003, EDI still *requires* expensive customization at each end, because dominant companies in every industry *refuse* to publish the whole state machine of all their value-added processes, gee I wonder why. EbXML has hit the same wall with its efforts to populate its catalogs of core component vocabulary and business process instances. The participation is insufficient among major corps. and platform vendors. 99% of the global corps fear and loathe this stuff! They work feverishly to tie their customers and suppliers, bind their information into corporate metadata registries and maintain some fiction that their business processes interactions with the marketplace are some kind of exclusive property. Now the tiny number of elites within the ebXML workgroups in UN/CEFACT will peevishly, declare themselves as "ontologists at large" and invent the whole vocabulary themselves, and retain the role of "registration authority" to itself. I can't even get a feed on the mailing lists of these "naming czars", which are all private. Dooming them to obscurity, I'm afraid, bunch of jerks, afaics, -Todd Boyle CPA -contributor ebXML Core Components Technical Specification
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To: "Todd Boyle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 06:55:03 +0000
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I worked extensively on the original EDI standardization effort and can say
that EDI will never really go away. Nearly all of the effort in EDI was
establishing the semantics, very little was spent on the syntax. So now the
syntax could be completely repaced with XML or whatever, and the underlying
meaning of the EDI semantics would continue to be used.
I would contrast that to the efforts in web services today. Now the protocol
experts complete their work and walk away, as if to say, "there, the work is
done, now you can start using our creation." What they fail to understand is
that syntax without semantics has nothing to say. It is no wonder that their
efforts bear no fruit. They forgot the hard work of building the meaning into
the transactions.
..tom
> http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021205S0008
>
> from abvoe
>
> Transactions' Evolving Next Wave Dec. 9, 2002
>
> Many industries are slow to adopt technologies such as Web services and
> remain wedded to EDI
> By Rick Whiting
>
> Last month, InformationWeek senior editor Rick Whiting moderated a
> teleconference roundtable with Global eXchange Services, a privately held
> provider of E-commerce services recently spun off from General Electric,
> and several GXS customers. The idea was to see how companies are adopting
> new technologies such as XML and Web services.
>
> Participants included GXS president and CEO Harvey Seegers; Max Ma and
> Louise Chazen, CEO and president, respectively, of 7thOnline, a provider of
> business-to-business supply-chain services to the apparel industry; Dan
> Garfi, fulfillment VP at ChemConnect, an online chemical exchange; and
> Shannon Boyd and Jim Schlaefer, senior VP for integration and information
> exchange director, respectively, at Transplace, a logistics and
> transportation- services supplier.
>
>
>
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