UBL members,
At the opening plenary of the UBL TC meeting in Denver, I noted
the consideration of a new UBL subcommittee, provisionally named
the Formatting Specification Subcommittee, to develop mappings
from UBL schemas to printed forms such as the UN Layout Key.
http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/200302/plen-rpt-20030203.sxi
I invited the members to read a proposed web page for the new
subcommittee prepared by Ken Holman and to consider
participation. At the closing plenary that Friday, I brought this
up again and received commitments from Dan Vint, Gunther Stuhec,
and Sue Probert to join the new SC along with Ken.
Since that time, informal discussions among this group have
produced refinements to the draft SC site and a new name, somewhat
easier to pronounce: FPSC (Forms Presentation SC). Ken is moving
the strawman FSSC materials over to FPSC as I write this, so by
Monday you should be able to see a strawman FPSC page at
http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/fpsc/
Remember that this is just a placeholder; we haven't actually
created the SC yet.
As the contributor of all the XSL stylesheets to the 0p70 release
and the primary author of the proposed SC charter, Ken Holman is
an obvious candidate for chair of the FPSC. I have asked Ken
whether he would agree to take this on, and he has kindly
consented to do so.
I've appended the current draft charter for the SC below. Please
look this over and speak up if you see anything that needs
changing. You should also let us know if you'd like to join the
initial group of people forming the FPSC. Assuming that we're
done fiddling with the charter by the time I get back from the
UN/CEFACT meeting next weekend, I'd like to formally propose
creation of the SC at that time in order for it to start operating
the week of 17 March.
Jon
==================================================================
FPSC Draft charter:
1. To liaise with standardization organizations responsible for
paper-based business commerce forms regarding evolving
requirements for the display of information.
2. To rapidly develop and document formal technology-agnostic
Formatting Specifications as interpretations of
internationally standardized or otherwise available
paper-based forms for the rendering of UBL documents
suitable for the human reader.
3. To foster implementations of these interpretations through
coordination, guidance and responsiveness to queries, in
order to test the viability of using different technologies
in real-world scenarios (e.g. stylesheet technologies, print
technologies, data entry strategies, etc.).
Possible deliverables:
1. Formatting specification guidelines
- principles of the development and use of the library of
formatting specifications
- principles of the presentation of UBL information
- catalogue of known implementations
2. Office-oriented example formatting specifications
3. Joinery-oriented example formatting specifications
4. United Nations UNECE aligned Trade Document layout key
formatting specifications
5. Other scenarios requested by the Library Content
Subcommittee for sample instances
Scope of work:
This committee work is presentation focused. The design of the
document models and the semantics of the business process
behind the document models is recognized as the purview of
other subcommittees. This subcommittee will approach the other
subcommittees with questions for clarification regarding these
aspects of the UBL information process.
This committee work will bridge the gap between the computers
using UBL and the humans who need to see the information, with
our focus being presenting the information found in instances
of UBL document models. Instances of other document models will
not be considered within scope at this time.
Both output-only and input-output presentation scenarios are
considered within scope at this time.
Standardizing the presentation of information in a
technology-agnostic fashion should foster the innovation and
proliferation of implementations. This committee will attempt
to nurture the implementation community with arms-length
support through respect and responsiveness in order to bring
about support from as wide a spectrum of technologies as
possible, without bias to any particular technology.
Manner and schedule of work:
The work of the subcommittee will be primarily through a mail
list set up on OASIS for subcommittee work. Access by the
public will be through an openly available mail list archive.
A library of intermediate work materials (links, files, meeting
minutes, examples, etc.) will be maintained through the
subcommittee web site and will be open for public access.
The pace of development will attempt to keep up with the
release of new document models from other UBL subcommittees and
with the responsiveness of the user community regarding
feedback the subcommittee may receive.
A work plan will be developed and published by (TBD) April 1,
2003 after which it will be reviewed periodically in light of
developments and progress.
Teleconferences will be scheduled on a regular basis (perhaps
as often as every week or two). Sun Microsystems has
offered to arrange for the teleconferences.
Technical liaison:
Liaison with the UBL Naming and Design Rules subcommittee (for
the business semantics) and the UBL Library Content
subcommittee (for sample instances) will be critically
important to the understanding of the information being
presented.
Liaison with the United Nations electronic Trade Documents
(UNeDocs) group of the UNECE is important regarding widely
accepted layouts for electronic business information.
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