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March 2005 Newsletter
MARCH 21, 2005
VOLUME 5, NUMBER 2
From the Executive Director
Transforming the Federal/NATO cataloging system into an ISO standard is a voyage into uncharted waters made even more interesting by the discovery along the way of literally hundreds of islands of expertise, each with their own culture and language. For the most part the natives are friendly and more than willing to allow us to benefit from their expertise, all they ask is that we acknowledge their work, consult with them as appropriate and stay true to our goal of making the information they have shared with us freely available to others.
Beyond its role as the standard descriptive language for cataloging, the eOTD will always be a living monument to the generosity of domain experts willing to share their knowledge. ECCMA is honored to be able to provide the architecture that allows what often appears to be disparate domains to come together in a consistent manner and to provide the public domain identifiers that allows definitions to be reliably and permanently referenced without risk in corporate data.
As we continue to develop and improve the eOTD we realize just how enormous the task ahead of us truly is, but we also recognize its critical importance to international commerce. The team of experts working on the development of the eOTD is involved in some truly ground breaking work and I am happy to report that they are well up to the task in hand. The architecture of the eOTD was starting to look daunting and to resolve this ISO 22745 will now include three separate models, a model for the representation of the eOTD as a dictionary of terms, a model for representing implementations of the dictionary that includes constraints and notes, and finally a model for the representation of catalogs that use the eOTD standardized terminology. Associated with these models ISO 22745 will also include a series of associated standards covering the design rules and procedures for the maintenance of the eOTD as well as guidelines on the use of the eOTD identifiers in files generated by Computer Assisted Drawing (CAD) and Computer Assisted Engineering (CAE) systems.
With a view to enabling the wide adoption of the eOTD, the team has also developed XML schemas for the eOTD dictionary, implementation and catalog data models and we will be providing free Web services resolution access to both the eOTD and the ESN Registry. Finally we are also working on a new eOTD search bar that can be incorporated into your browser or desktop. The eOTD search combines both an eOTD word and ESN Registry part number search capability.
I would once again like to thank Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC), DLIS, Lehigh University, LSC, PartNet, Standing Stone Media and the UK NCB, as well as members of ISO TC184/SC4, TC37/SC1 and JTC1/SC32 for their exemplary work in the development of the next generation of the eOTD. I would also like to acknowledge the dedication and the consistent quality of the work of the ECCMA research team in India that provides the ECCMA members with a unique resource.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Benson
Executive Director, ECCMA
ECCMA Welcomes New Board Member
We are happy to report on the appointment of our New Director, Bern Werner. Bern is a former Marine Corps Officer. During his six-year career he served in a variety of leadership and technical project management positions. A 1988 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he led a team of marines through systems testing of a state-of-the-art command and control (C2) system now in use by the Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard. He spent his last two years of service as an instructor at the Marine Corps Communications & Electronics School, teaching communications theory, system maintenance and operation.
In 1994, Bern joined Management Science Associates and was the project manager for an implementation of a Supply Chain information warehouse and reporting system for a Fortune 10 CPG customer. The system involved the collection, normalization, and data warehousing of terabytes of information for large consumer packaged goods companies and their distribution networks. In recognition of his achievements he was promoted to Group Director of Information Management, and helped bring additional customers on board as it grew to become the most profitable division in the company.
In 1998 Bern co-founded Innovative Resource Group, Inc. (IRG), an information management business which grew to more than 150 employees in just three years while maintaining both profits and revenue growth. IRG developed workflow data management and electronic forms applications, and delivered data cleansing and coding services.
IRG was purchased and then merged with iGate Global Solutions Ltd (IGS), an independent operating company of iGate Corporation. Bern was the VP of IGS's Enterprise Data Management group, delivering data cleansing and coding services, data warehouse consulting, and management of IGS's proprietary data management software suite.
He recently founded BCI Data, a data management consulting and service provider. He can be reached at bern@bcidata.com
eOTD Implementation Guides
The ECCMA application development team led by Sheron Koshy in conjunction with Josh Lampe of Standing Stone Media are working on a web based Implementation Guide Builder that will allow ECCMA members to build, maintain and publish their eOTD Implementation Guides on the ECCMA website. These Implementation Guides will be constantly monitored for eOTD compliance and available for download as eOTD XML files for use in cataloging applications. We hope that this will help us avoid the proliferation of implementation guides that plague EDI to this day, not to mention the development of non compliant EDI Implementation Guides.
eOTD Maintenance Procedures
The eOTD maintenance procedures will be included in ISO 22745 and while we will be preserving the 15 day approval cycle with a monthly publication cycle there will be some changes in the procedures particularly as they relate to the addition of new properties and property values.
The procedure for requesting the addition of a new ECCMA Standard Class (old Standard Item) will remain essentially unchanged with the need to provide a preferred name and a suggested definition along with the selection of two existing closely matched classes with an explanation as to why the new class is different. The ECCMA research staff will ensure the name complies with ISO 22745-11 and develop an ISO 22745-12 compliant definition these will then be sent out to ballot to the ECCMA domain experts. The experts will be asked to vote in favor of the addition or against by recommending the use of an existing class.
The procedure for requesting the addition of a new ECCMA Standard Property or ECCMA Standard Value will be built into the ESN Registration procedure. This requires the cataloging of a specific item with the request for a new property or property value included as a cataloging option. A preferred name and suggested definition is required and the request is also routed to the ECCMA research team from where the procedure is similar to that used for the request for a new class. The reason for the difference in procedure is to ensure that the domain experts can understand how the new property is to be used within the context of the description of an item. This procedure can not be used for requests for new classes because a class is required to initiate the cataloging process.
ISO 22745 will also include a new harmonization process under which other international, national and industry standards can be incorporated and referenced in the eOTD. A team of the ECCMA research department is tasked with identifying dictionaries, vocabularies and classifications that can be used to improve the depth of the eOTD. We expect this to be a permanent function of the ECCMA research department and I would be glad to hear from any ECCMA member who knows of a work that they believe should be harmonized with the eOTD.
Finally we are working on a separate quality control process that allows users and domain experts to identify errors and duplications in the eOTD and these are dealt with through an expert review process. No entry in the eOTD is ever removed from the AUDIT file as this is essential in ensuring backwards compatibility; corrections are made through merge and split notations where the old identifier is marked as deleted with a pointer to the new corrected identifier(s).
Priority of eOTD development work
Our first priority is to support the eOTD Implementation Guides and to ensure that all eOTD concepts (Class, Property, Value, Units of Measure etc.) that are “required” or “used” in an Implementation Guide are accurately defined. As a second priority we use the ESN Registry ranking of use to prioritizing our work. The best way to ensure that your needs are met is to develop an eOTD Implementation Guide and while the on-line web application for Implementation Guides is being developed you can simply send Dan King a spreadsheet of the classes, properties and values you use in your cataloging work. Additionally we can also arrange for a batch upload of your catalog to the ESN Registry.
10th International Symposium on Codification
October 10-15th 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland
The Symposium On-Line Registration system will be available from Monday 7th March together with an upgraded web-site to provide full details of the Symposium.
The Symposium will have a significant presence and input from ECCMA as one of the major Sponsors. We will present a number of Workshops and Seminars to provide delegates with the opportunity to look in detail at how ECCMA and the eOTD can help businesses across the globe best manage their Product Catalogues and their involvement with the Supply Chain.
ECCMA Laboratory at Lehigh University
Donald Hillman
Lehigh University has just become the newest member of the Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE), providing 31 million in engineering and design software, hardware, and educational tools. Leading members of PACE are General Motors, Sun Microsystems, EDS and UGS. The objective of the PACE program is to make students proficient with the latest computer-based design tools. We are planning to have the ECCMA Research Laboratory at Lehigh take an active role in the PACE program with the specific aim of training engineers in the use of the eOTD. ECCMA's current project with the NATO AC/135 group involves the integration of eOTD cataloging with computer-aided design using the STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Data) approach. Plans are being drawn up to have an ECCMA Research Laboratory short course early this June on the Lehigh campus. This would be the first step in establishing a continuing training program for graduating design engineers in the use of the eOTD
For those interested in the summer course, please contact the ECCMA Secretariat for further news.
Classification Schemas and Global Commerce
Bern Werner
Over the past decade a number of respectable organizations have been developing hierarchical classification schemas to enable the categorization or grouping of commodity items into common buckets. From the domain specific work (PIDX) to the more generic (UNSPSC, eClass, etc.) efforts, the benefits of applying a classification schema to items of supply have been tangible. This has been proven in the areas of spend analysis, inventory management, and item master management. Grouping items by category can help an organization find and eliminate duplicates in master files, identify and fix data quality issues, and greatly reduce inventory shelf space. Items that are assigned hierarchical classification codes can also be aggregated and analyzed to help companies understand and improve purchasing decisions.
In addition to the financial benefits, a number of valuable lessons have been learned during the development and application of classification codes:
- Suppliers are willing to adopt open standards for cataloging
- Domain expertise is paramount for accurate mapping of classification codes to product descriptions
- Inadequate descriptive attributes can make item classification a complex process, especially in global trading where language or cultural differences become a factor
- Accurate classifications do not replace good descriptions
The classification systems have enabled companies to add structure to inventory management, perform spend analysis beyond that provided by GL codes, and have helped improve overall supply chain efficiency. However, these classifications of items have not provided the level of granularity that enables buyers to confidently participate in B2b marketplaces and efficiently purchase from e-catalogs. Did we put the cart before the horse? A global standard for consistently characterizing individual items at a level that makes them unambiguous in the global marketplace has not been available. Until recently, that is.
The ECCMA Open Technical Dictionary (eOTD) is an ISO, open standard containing more than 67,000 Standard Class Names (nouns) and nearly 50,000 Standard Property Names (qualifiers or modifiers). Combined with the additional tables (Unit of Measure, Property Values, etc.), the eOTD provides the granularity necessary for seamless, global e-commerce. Supplier products are more discernable to customers. E-catalog users enjoy a faster, more accurate search experience. Buyers utilize e-commerce more efficiently as they become familiar with a single standard.
The eOTD is classification neutral. Any classification system or systems may be applied to an eOTD item. The processes of classifying an eOTD item will be more exact because of the comprehensive list of properties used in each item description, resulting in increased inventory optimization and accurate spend analysis. Additionally, the combination of any hierarchical classification code and eOTD structure will enable analysts to roll up their sleeves and spend on more levels.
Adoption of a global data standards system is an enormous task when you consider the hundreds of thousands of suppliers in the world, the millions of items, and the language translation challenges. How will the eOTD fare? The UPC did not enjoy widespread acceptance into industrial applications until it was accepted by the US Department of Defense. The Defense Logistics Information Services (DLIS) was the first to adopt the eOTD standard and has already created more than 2 million eOTD items. DLIS is the worlds largest and most experienced cataloging organization with a 50 year history and over 5000 man years invested in cataloging. That's a positive sign.
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