BSR PRESENTATION

What problems have to be solved?

With apologies for the misuse of biblical terms: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was one". Then after some time there was more than one tongue which culminated in the "Tower of Babel" and the inability of people to understand one another. Today we are in a very similar situation. Communication, particularly in the era of electronic communication, has become very much like that "Tower of Babel" with its multiple International, Regional, National, Sectoral and Organizational approaches. These are attempting not only to provide communications options, but also trying to develop solutions to find the "Rosetta stone" to inter-relate between options or to provide a common approach with standard data.

Some examples of the problem:

• A simple concept like a Delivery Date can mean the date on which goods are delivered to a customer by some systems or organizations, or be the date on which a delivery leaves the supplier on its way to the customer for other systems or organizations.
• Delivery can have different meanings in Health Care/Gynecology or in Commerce/Trade. In the former it refers to the delivery of a child and in the latter to the delivery of goods. In English using Delivery in context can be understood, but, preferably, ChildDelivery and GoodsDelivery would be more precise. In French there are two separate terms – "accouchement" and "livraison" respectively. This shows the need for precision in data specification to ensure that the correct unambiguous meaning is available in each language so that what is being communicated is understood in exactly the same way by both the sender and the receiver.
• An important work of comparison has been made between STEP and EDIFACT in the PPDH project. (cf. example STEP/EDIFACT).

The initiatives searching for a common language for Electronic Commerce and "Information Society" are developing new "data registers" (or redefining old ones) which present two main kinds of difficulty:

• Their entries are the name of data elements. But from one system to an another, the same data name can have a different meaning, and, at the opposite, the same concept can be named differently in different systems.
• Data are only presented in English (names and definitions): information system developments in other languages, including electronic exchanges, need secured bridges between languages.

The BSR paradigm is helpful to solve these two kinds of difficulties, by proposing a Register of Semantic Units where the entries are the definitions themselves expressed in different languages (and if necessary, in various vocabularies) in order to overcome ambiguities. The BSR also contains bridges with external registers. So the BSR is a useful tool to accelerate and stabilize work dealing with semantic aspects that have to be shared by many people from different sectors, countries, languages and cultures.

Examples of needs covered by the BSR

• Need to share semantics in a neutral way. Whatever the media used to exchange information, people have to share unambiguously defined concepts in order to be able to process these information. To share concepts doesn't mean to use the same language for naming and defining these concepts. The BSR is neutral based on its multilingualism.
• Need to reference, retrieve information from any source or culture. Need to have more efficient "tags" and keywords:
  • Registration in a public repository with easy accesses.
  • Non-ambiguous definitions,
  • And in native languages...
• Need to perpetuate the work done upon semantics in many areas by many different communities.
  • Need to capture as much as possible all the work done (to register, to disseminate…)
  • Need sometimes to add value to this work, by improving coherence between all those data and by establishing bridges between different dictionaries.