Attendees:

Indroductions

The XML Task Force of the Aftermarket Council on Electronic Commerce (ACEC) was formed by unanimous decree of those in attendance at the Aftermarket Internet Summit in Phoenix, March 6, 2001. Ed Wolff of Dana volunteered to chair the Task Force.

1. 1) Determine and define the participants, process and scope of the XML Task Force
2. 2) Determine what we should use as a baseline for XML standards in the aftermarket

Alise Miner presented an overview of what she and Karen Hurst of Dana thought an appropriate XML standard for the aftermarket would look like.

• the Schema
• the Standardized tag names
• the Standardized DTD (document type definition)

• XML Declaration
• Document type names (purchase order, etc.)
• Standardized Groups (like segments)
• Standardized data Elements

Tony Perkin initiated a discussion to clarify the definition of our objectives. In summary, it was agreed that XML would be a great e-commerce enable for the aftermarket. Basic industry-specific standards for XML applications were necessary to promote the rapid development of XML applications in the industry. It would be the role of the XML Task Force of the ACEC to define the Aftermarket-specific components of XML, and make those tools openly available. ACEC would NOT be involved in any application development or e-Commerce activity.

Ed Wolff offered this explanation of the challenge: " Any two trading partners can communicate with EDI today because they agree to convert from their proprietary application format to a recognized industry standard format or an agreed upon non-standard format. This facilitates a two-way exchange

However, those parties invested in EDI do not want to change and don't want to abandon their EDI capabilities. They do, however, want to enable those parties that are browser-based (XML capable) to communicate with them. Conversely, trading partners that are XML-enabled want to be able to communicate with those that are EDI capable. In short, a translator should be able to receive either EDI or XML and translate to a standard format and output in either EDI or XML. The translator should not care which input it gets and should not care which output is requested. The translator must use the ACEC recognized formats (EDI) and tags (XML). "

Roger Cadaret sounded a warning about cross-communication between EDI and XML enabled partners: " Regarding translators - they won't be used. There should be minimum rules. Use translators at your own risk. The talk of EDI is nice - but it's all going to be XML. The bigger standards setting bodies are already going that way." Roger concluded with, "The role of ACEC is to coordinate the standards and make them broader. The only thing I'm sure the Task Force should do is create the data dictionary and build a repository of tag definitions. If X.12 is developing schemas that would take care of that issue."

There are three components needed to define XML data element tags:

Group - a collection of Elements

Example: address

Name Space - Labels the application of the Group of Elements

Examples: customer, ship to, bill to

Elements - a unique field of data that may be used in many places in a single document. Example: name, address, postal code

NOTE: Elements have attributes (length, character type) that we may chose to define or not.

These components of the structure combine in the following way:

The highest level of the data dictionary is the Document Type. ie. Purchase Order. A Document Type is a collection of data Groups. Instances of Groups occur in a specific Name Space. And a Group within a specific Name Space is comprised of one or more Data Elements. Ed thinks of the hierarchy as a "bill of materials. The resulting hierarchy is:

Karin explained that web-based forms could be developed for submitting requests from industry for additional data elements. Request Forms would go to the Task Force for validation before the aftermarket XML database was updated. And, a new e-commerce document would have to be ACEC approved before data element petitions could be considered.

Ed Wolff explained that Dana would build the "bill of materials" structure for hosting the data dictionary. He would lead the task of reconciling the PIES 2.0 specification from AAIA and the EDI documents from MEMA. He would lead the effort to publish the data dictionary on the Internet in an open and accessible format.

Scott Luckett explained that the completed Data Dictionary was a separate matter for approval by the ACEC. The documents that it supports from AAIA and MEMA are still pending approval from the ACEC.

It was agreed that the following volunteers would approve submissions to the data dictionary:

The XML Task Force adjourned with an agreement to fast-track development of the data dictionary with a draft available for the next ACEC meeting in September. A conference call among the participants was scheduled for early June.