Trading Partner Project Team Objectives & Scope

In scope

The Objective of the ebXML Trading Partner Project Team is to develop a specification that:

  1. Specifies how two parties may automatically and compatibily configure themselves to electronically exchange business documents
  2. Specifies how two party configuration mechanisms may be used in multi-party business relationships
  3. Describes structures for Trading Party Information that may be used as part of a legal agreement between parties
  4. Conforms to RFC 2119 (as modified by Klaus)
  5. Specifies the non product/service descriptive (alternatively non Business Process) Trading Partner Information that must be shared between parties:
    1. in order for those parties to sucessfully carry out:
      1. a shared Business Process;
      2. the exchange of documents over a variety of transport communication protocols,
    2. that meets the requirements of the TRP, R&R and BP/CC project teams
  6. Describes how one party may discover the information required to meet the previous objective (is this out of scope?)
  7. Is business process independent
  8. Describes:
    1. how to identify a pre-defined model of a business process (e.g. a RosettaNet PIP),
    2. how that pre-defined model is used in a specific instance of an information (document?) exchange between two parties
  9. Supports existing standards for Trading Party Agreements (e.g US Federal Government Contractor Registration agreement (CCR), X12 Trading Partner Profile (838), ... full list to be determined)
  10. That is independent of the internal processes of any of the parties (need to look at United Nations recommendations nos. 26 Interchange Agreement for EDI and 31 Electronic Commerce Agreement)
  11. That describes the different ways that may be used to communicate Trading Party Information between parties, for example:
    1. once in a way that is applicable to all similar business processes carried out between parties (i.e. a TPA)
    2. from scratch/on the fly

     

    From the IBM tpaML spec (not yet reviewed/agreed):

  12. to support interchange between partners that have both client and server characteristics
  13. to describe all the valid visible, and hence enforceable, interactions between the parties
  14. to provide a high-level specification that can be easily comprehended by humans and yet is precise enough for enforcement by computers

    15. Out of Scope

    TBD

    Definition of terms

  15. Trading Partner Agreement
  16. Trading Partner Profile
  17. Trading Partner Information
  18. Trading Partner Discovery Process is a method by which one party can discover profile information:
    1. on the products and services another party offers (definitely out of scope of the TP team)
    2. that enables two parties to automatically and compatibily configure themselves to electronically exchange business documents (probably out of scope of the TP team)