OASIS Open

OASIS Semantic Support for Electronic Business Document Interoperability (SET) Technical Committee

No document standard is sufficient for all purposes because the requirements significantly differ amongst businesses, industries and geo-political regions. On the other hand, the ultimate aim of business document interoperability is to exchange business data among partners without any prior agreements related to the document syntax and semantics. Therefore, an important characteristic of a document standard is its ability to adapt to different contexts, its extensibility and customization.

UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS) is an important landmark in this direction. UN/CEFACT CCTS provides a methodology to identify a set of reusable building blocks, called Core Components to create electronic documents. Core Components represent the common data elements of everyday business documents such as "Address", "Amount", or "Line Item". These reusable building blocks are then assembled into business documents such as "Order" or "Invoice" by using the CCTS methodology. Core components are defined to be context-independent so that they can later be restricted to different contexts. Many core components defined by UN/CEFACT are available to users from UN/CEFACT Core Component Library.

CCTS is gaining widespread adoption by both the horizontal and the vertical standard groups. Universal Business Language (UBL) was the first implementation of the CCTS methodology. Some earlier horizontal standards such as Global Standard One (GS1) XML and Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS), and some vertical industry standards such as CIDX and RosettaNet have also taken up CCTS.

The OASIS SET TC aims to specify semantic mechanisms to achieve interoperability among document standards based of UN/CEFACT CCTS used in B2B, B2G and G2G applications by continuing work initiated by the iSURF Project (http://www.iSURFProject.eu) in three respects:

1. Semantic Support for Context Domains

   Core component based document schema customization allows the modification of standard components in response to contextual needs. Schemas can be extended by adding new components or can be restricted by removing components or by limiting cardinality of components to a subset. Eight context categories have also been introduced. When a document schema needs to be customized for a context, users need to manually discover or provide component versions applicable to that particular context.

   The OASIS SET TC aims to specify semantic support mechanisms to provide machine processable semantic representations for the context domains to annotate core components to facilitate their discovery and reuse. This semantic will be obtained from the taxonomies and code lists already in use in the industry. This will allow the development of automated processes that intelligently search through custom components by interpreting class-subclass, equivalence and other relationships specified in context ontologies and gather applicable versions of components.

2. Semantic Support for Customization of Core Components and Business Document Schemas

   Core component based business document schemas are composed of several basic and aggregate components. Aggregate components themselves are collections of other basic and aggregate components in a recursive manner. Many aggregate components in this hierarchy are included by other components and document schemas themselves. So customizing an intermediate component for a context implicitly customizes all document schemas including that component for the same context.

   In order to customize a document schema for a particular business context, it is necessary to traverse the component hierarchy of the schema and gather applicable custom versions. Furthermore, a business context value may consist of values from multiple context categories. Semantic support will be provided for this purpose by using context ontologies.

   The ability to automate schema customization will lead to a significant new flexibility, that is, it becomes possible to merge multiple versions of a component to generate additional versions of that particular component. This greatly simplifies the component customization effort as it is no longer necessary to manually provide customized components for every single business context. Instead, it is sufficient to customize components for individual context categories since combinations for multiple categories can be automatically generated as needed. When a target context value includes multiple categories or has multiple parents or a mixture of both, component repository may contain multiple applicable versions of a particular component. For such cases, the derivation rules from individual versions will be automatically serialized by successively applying them to the corresponding document component.

3. Semantic Support for Document Translation

   OASIS SET TC will provide a machine processable mechanism that can express the structure and the semantics of components together with their correspondences in different versions. In this way, it will become possible to develop tools to help with semantic translation of Core component based electronic business documents. For this purpose, first a UBL "Component Ontology" will be developed. In the later phases, this ontology will be expanded to cover other document standards based on CCTS.

   The Component Ontology serves two major purposes:

   • Representing the semantics of components: Document customization takes place at the level of individual types and elements; hence, translation needs to be done at the same level. When an automated process compares two versions of a schema, it needs to be able to identify corresponding elements in these schemas. When document elements are represented as classes of a common component ontology, it becomes possible to utilize that ontology for the computation of similarities between elements from different schemas.
   • Representing the structure of document schemas: Core component based document schemas are complex hierarchies including numerous types and elements any of which might be modified through customization. Even in the case of semantically equivalent components, comparison is a complicated task unless supported by proper tools. By representing the structural layout of types and elements using classes from common component ontology, it becomes possible to utilize semantic reasoners for the comparison of these complex hierarchies.

CCTS is gaining widespread adoption by both the horizontal and the vertical standard groups. Universal Business Language (UBL) was the first implementation of the CCTS methodology. Some earlier horizontal standards such as Global Standard One (GS1) XML and Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS), and some vertical industry standards such as CIDX and RosettaNet have also taken up CCTS. However, all these standards apply CCTS differently as detailed in:

Kabak Y., Dogac A., "A Survey and Analysis of Electronic Business Document Standards", http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/webpage/publications

The SET TC will assess the existing CCTS based document standards to define and implement semantic support for interoperability among them starting with different customization of UBL document schemas and will provide tool support and a testbed for testing interoperability.

OASIS SET TC will develop three Technical Specifications described below, and also may elect to issue Technical Reports and White Papers:

• Specification of semantic support mechanisms to provide machine processable semantic representations for the context domains to annotate core components to facilitate their discovery and reuse -- final version available in December 2008 (the TC may issue intermediate versions as frequently as every 6 months)
• Specification of Semantic Support for Customization of Core Components and Business Document Schemas in June 2009 (intermediate versions may be available as frequently as every 6 months)
• Specification of machine processable mechanism that can express the structure and the semantics of components together with their correspondences in different versions
• Technical Reports will be drafted as appropriate
• White Papers as appropriate

SET TC will operate under "RF on Limited Terms" mode.

The anticipated audience for this work includes members of the Ontolog Forum, OASIS ebXML Registry TC, OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) TC, non-OASIS Business and Government Document standards groups, the related units of NIST, programmers, vendors and users. The work should be of interest to anyone involved with Electronic Business Documents.

English. The TC may elect to form subcommittees that produce localized documentation of the TC's work in additional languages.