We took a few days off cycling in Holland.  We were staying at Scheveningen just outside of The Hague.  Our route took us via Rotterdam.  The last time I was in Rotterdam I was at the UNCEFACT conference in 2001.    We found ourselves having lunch just by the World Trade Center where the conference was held.    It brought back some good memories and some bad memories.  

The good memories

UNCEFACT is a UN Organization charged with facilitating trade and electronic business.  At the time that I was last in Rotterdam, ebXML had just completed their proof of concept and the whole organization was trying to work out what to do next.  

ebXML is an XML dialect that was sponsored by UNCEFACT, in an attempt to bring electronic data interchange out of the flatfile world and into the, (then), modern world of XML.   It contained standard definitions of business objects like "Items" and "Orders".

As I remember SAP was quite close to the ebXML world.  Oracle was closer to the Open Applications Group OAGiS.  ebXML and EDI in general is more focused on the Business to Business Problem (B2B) where as OAGis was more focused on the Application to Application integration problem (A2A).  

Of course, an end customer sees an application squirt out a transaction in one business, that zooms along a pipe, and then gets sucked into a different application at another business.  You have to understand the applications to make everything work.  

I saw  meetings run where trade representatives of countries were held to their speaking times, issues were addressed, decisions were  documented and results were published.  I was amazed that things were happening at speed between sovereign governments.   

The bad memories

This all happened in 2001.  I was in the World Trade Center in Rotterdam as the planes went into the World Trade Center in New York.  I was stuck on the other side of a very changed world.  I was apart from my wife and son.    I did not know how I would get home.  

The takeaway

As we hung our heads in silence to kick off the second day of the conference, we all committed to the belief that trade is good and to enable trade is therefore good.  People that trade are less likely to go to war with each other.  

My thanks to my friends and colleague Garret Minakawa who asked me to go and David Connelly who guided me in my time as chair of the Open Applications Group. 

References

1. UNCEFACT: 

Trade Facilitation and E-business(UN/CEFACT) | UNECE 

2. ebXML

ISO 15000-1:2021 - Electronic business eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML)

3. OAG

OAGi.org