OASIS Open

Ontopia

Yes

UBL has defined an important set of identifiers for all kinds of subjects related to the performance of international business. However, from the point of view of having these widely adopted for use in other applications, it is a pity that they are

1) extremely verbose
2) difficult to discover and interpret

We would like to see a parallel set of identifiers published as URIs using the conventions of Published Subjects worked out by the OASIS Published Subjects TC. We believe such identifiers would achieve far wider adoption. As an example, compare

urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:CommonBasicComponents-1.0:Region

and

http://psi.oasis-open.org/UBL/Region

whereby the latter would resolve to a Published Subject Indicator (a simple HTML page) providing the UBL Definition of "Region", Alternative Business Terms ("LocalityName", "Economic Zone"), Examples ("European Union"), etc.

Such an identifier would be immensely more accessible to users of both UBL and other applications and thereby increase interoperability and decrease the problems associated with the development of
multiple overlapping B2B ontologies and XML vocabularies.