Paul,
I'm certain the way forward here is a blend of the
UPU work, CIQ and
then using CAM as the processing
engine.
The Royal Mail rep' to the UPU has ensured that the
UPU has the
right semantics and rules for UK postal
addresses. I agree some
of it is surprisingly gnarly. When they
changed to the post code
system back twenty+ years ago it was a great step
forward in
automation - but I was amazed to find out how many
times the
seamingly obvious system is actually broken by
local rules.
What we are looking at is taking those formal UPU
rules and
encoding them in CAM, and then using the content
reference
system to equate to the CIQ dictionary and UPU
dictionary.
Once we have that - we can also look at storing
the
individual element noun semantics in the registry.
I believe we have the technology means to do this
now -
all we need is resource and time to actually put it
in
place.
Thanks, DW
----- Original Message -----
From:
Paul Spencer
To: David RR Webber ; Peter Kacandes ;
regrep
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 9:32
AM
Subject: RE: [regrep] UK Government
Registry Requirements
I
know that John Borras is already heavily involved in this, so I don't intend
to start unless invited by him. I think the difficulty is mapping the British
Standard onto the CIQ format. Even if you can, and I am sure there are ways,
there are local semantics to incorporate (such as for the Unique Property
Reference Number) that require a means of localizing the semantics. Hence my
earlier comment about getting you excited (since I am sure CAM can help
here).
Regards
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: David RR Webber
[mailto:]
Sent: 15 January 2004 21:04
To:
Paul Spencer; Peter Kacandes; regrep
Subject: Re: [regrep] UK
Government Registry Requirements
Paul,
Returning to the addressing stuff - the OASIS
CIQ work and
related to that the UPU work is extremely fine-grained.
The level of detail of not just the XML
elements - but the semantics,
rules and formats are covered. There are
roughly five address formats
for each postal service - as you point out -
its not just about
delivering bits of mail. The cultural
rules on address formatting are
also very important - as is being able to
handle addresses of
say - waterpumping stations and power
substations for utilities.
So - you will find that the UPU particularly
has a great deal of
semantics on all this.
The CAM has been upgraded to cover off what the
UPU needs,
and so the ultimate goal from the enduser
experience is to
have an address object - that they input
context into -
such as locale and use - and have the XML
autoconfigure
to that.
We have been busy looking at this in
significant detail.
Thanks,
DW.
