UBL LCSC Minutes

Tuesday - 24 September 2002

Attendees: Bill Meadows, Marion Royal, Mike Adcock, Peter Yim, Tim McGrath, Sally Chan, Lisa Seaburg, Jon Bosak, Debbie Quezdez, Monica Martin

1. Opening of Meeting

Mike Adcock volunteered to take minutes

2. Acceptance of Previous Minutes

There were no prior comments to the Minutes, nor any raised at the meeting. However at this point in the meeting there were only seven participants and thus no quorum to formally accept them.

3. Release Op65 Package

Status: distributed, collecting comments. Lisa had received comments from Monica Martin, and Bill Bircham. She was waiting to hear from Liaison committee members, but had received none yet. Maybe we gave too short a time for comment, bearing in mind the liaison groups own timetabling of meetings and maybe they each need to collate their response. Certainly both XBRL, UIG have said they will be putting in comments

Supplements: The supplementary page has been added. Lisa explained she has added it as a page with links to Mike's invoice work, Tim's xml, xst, html etc work pages. She asked people who had not spotted this to check the web site; to look above list of documents for a new link and to try it.

Issues: Mike reported on gathering together the Issues list, sent to Lisa/Tim just before the meeting. The Issues come from retrofit modeling, reviewing definitions, and from trying to re-use aggregates in the Invoice spreadsheet, also recently made available. Issues at this stage range from small easy-fix ones to some significant ones that need to be discussed through the F2F week. Mike suggested that everyone should check the issues list and add anything that is missing, and contribute comments to the issues. Mike undertook to categorise issues as major/minor between now and the F2F meeting.

Lisa said she needed to review the generation of XML from the invoice spreadsheet with Gunther.

Liaisons: There is a conference call scheduled for Friday 27. John is unable to participate and is asking Mark Crawford to take the meeting. Lisa volunteered as stand-in for Mark if necessary. Additionally John said there may be a liaison call on the Friday during the F2F meeting; to be decided by this week's conference call..

4. Moving to release 1.0

• Tim felt the group was on course for sorting comments out during the F2F week, in spite of having received no liaison feedback yet.

• Jon believed we could interpret the low response as 'we had not left anything for others to say', having done essentially good and thorough work. It did not seem that other activities were generally as far advanced as the UBL work.

• Jon senses an eagerness on the part of developers to use the UBL material. To some extent we are 'holding them back' as we are saying "we're not quite finished yet".

• Tim reckoned that the November plenary would be the point at which the 1.0 version would be finalised. There is a lot to do in next week's F2F on refining version 0.65.

• Jon observed that following the due process is important here, we have openly invited input/criticism. Review cycles build credibility even if the number of comments is not necessarily great.

5. Next Face-to-Face

• There are issues to resolve. Joint discussions are needed with the NDR group on containers, but we do appear to be heading to a conclusion and should be able to re-model relatively easily in line with the conclusion. The F2F meeting needs to go carefully through the containership proposal and and to explore implementation. The F2F session should be the opportunity to review such issues.
• Agenda: Tim sent the agenda out in draft form. It will be updated to include w&c on the Thursday: everyone is expected to bring a native wine. (an expectation accompanied by some disbelief that the UK can achieve this: just you wait!)
• The agenda dedicates 2 hours each day to a joint session with NDR, and a separate agenda for the joint sessions is being discussed. Tim anticipates:
• Wednesday: disposition of comments, open discussion on containership
• Thursday: to work through a prototype of UBL 1.0, aiming to produce a sample. This is expected to highlight the need for tools etc, and consequently Gunther and Arofan are both needed in this session
• Friday - action plan for 6 weeks between end of the October F2F and the November Plenaryout. The expectation is that the UBL 1.0 distribution pack will come out of the November plenary meeting.
• A speaker phone session was planned for 1 hour pre-lunch, from 11.30 to 12.30 (East Coast Time) on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Bill will this set up as he has the facilities, and will advise Lisa of call-in details for the group. At a minimum, Peter, Monica and Sally will be on these conference calls as 'virtual participants'.
• John emphasised that we have adopted new rules; the plenary will have dial-in facilities.
• The possibility of using NetMeeting on-line with the meeting was discussed but discarded for potential firewall problems. Wherever possible, any presentation/discussion material should be sent to Peter in advance, so that the material could be put up on NetMeeting for virtual participants. Alternatively such material could be sent to all virtual members.
• John has to add four sub-committee members officially, Joe Chiusano, Monica Martin, Bill Meadows, and Deborah ? All were confirmed as OASIS members.

6. Reports on status of other UBL sub-committees

• Tim added reports on other committees back into the agenda, as we have not had joint meetings recently.
• NDR sc: Lisa participated and reported it was a brief meeting mainly focused on agenda and discussion on topics for the FG2F meeting.
• Liaison sc: no report as meeting not held yet; to come on Friday.
• Chairs sc: this has not met.
• Ontology sc: this sc is in the stages of re-emerging as an interest group. Peter has sent out invitations to members who have expressed an interest, and to crucial people with expert knowledge in the area. He is trying to get more participants from a wider field than just USA, e.g. some European participation. He reckons on 2-3 weeks for the restart of ontology interest group. He asked for any sponsors to contact him.
• Peter agreed to be the official liaison of this interest group. Tim observed that one potential useful exercise would be to carry out a rigorous QA check on UBL material.

7. Reports on Other Groups

• CCTS: Mike reported that he expected the final version from CCTS to be available by the end of the week. The aim is to post this latest CCTS to the UBL comments list immediately it is available Mike stressed that he felt the differences between that version Tim has and this final version will be minor refinements.
• CCSD: Sally reported that there is an updated CCSD document pre-Geneva. Monica reported that the group went through some of EAN example on the Wednesday of the Geneva meeting. Fred Blommestein is taking over as project leader: he is planning to meet up with Reginald of EAN to accelerate their CC work. Mike emphasised the importance of carefully defining the scope of the UBL Order, the Boeing Spare Parts Order and the EAN FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) Order. While these will have areas of overlap, they are addressing different business scenarios: in themselves vital experiments in coexistence and harmonisation.

8. Other Business

• There was general discussion about the CEFACT proposal for a marriage between UBL and CEFACT activity. While there was enthusiasm for it, provided it did not slow UBL activity down, there was also some concern expressed about the lack of clarity and definition in the role of the various CEFACT groups.
• This would be discussed at the F2F meeting, tempered with UBL's realisation of "the need for good strong products and fast."

9. Next Meeting - Face to Face, Oct 1 - Oct 4, Burlington, Mass.