The BSR project, initially a joint ISO/UN-ECE initiative, commenced several years before ICARIS became involved. It was managed by the BSR Management Committee with representative from the UN-ECE, ISO and other aligned organisations, mainly drawn from various EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) committees.
The ICARIS project saw the need for some kind of stable semantic reference point as a standard means of naming data elements so that the structure of files and objects could be communicated between computer systems and various tasks automated in an open environment. Among these are:
In July of 1995, ICARIS provided an expert to a meeting of the Ad Hoc group formed by the BSR/MC in Geneva to develop the rules and methodology for constructing a BSR.
The ICARIS project carried out extensive research on the traditional EDI directories (EDIFACT and X12) and devised a means whereby Basic Semantic Units could be built using these directories as a starting point and the terms of a Controlled Vocabulary (CV) extracted. This was achieved and in a significant collaboration between Denis Hill of ISO (the Project Team Manager for the BSR/MC project) and Ken Steel of ICARIS the definitions for the extracted CV terms were produced.
In December, 1995 another Ad Hoc team met in Paris and varied the terms of the BSR project, setting it on a significantly different course. This narrowed the scope of the BSR to the point where most of the ICARIS objectives could not be met.
It was decided ICARIS would not adopt these changes and would continue in the direction it was heading. Many new advances were made, particularly in refining the rules and procedures for building the semantic labels for BSUs (Basic Semantic Units) and in the technology of bridging and crossreferencing to other data dictionaries and directories.
These advances by the ICARIS project were incorporated into the software for an experimental BSR which was populated with a sample selection of BSUs and their associated CV terms which applied to the Purchasing Business process. This sample was not intended to be complete or exhaustive, but to test the thinking and approach behind the Australian Enhanced BSR.
A manual was produced (with comments by Denis Hill of ISO incorporated) which explained the BSR with the ICARIS enhancements, showed how it could be used and how the experimental BSR could be accessed. This manual, "The Users Guide to the BSR", is available for download as a winword 6.0 file.
This experimental Australian Enhanced BSR and the Users Guide was placed on line on the Internet in the first week of January 1996 for scrutiny and comment by the BSR/MC and the Ad Hoc team (only two of which responded). On January 31, 1996 the ftp location of the "Users Guide to the BSR" (which incorporates instructions on how to access and operate the BSR) was publicised world-wide with a request for comments. A number of interested parties downloaded the manual, some explored the experimental BSR and a range of comments were received.
As a result of further research work, the experience gained from this experiment and the comments received, the original concept of the BSR, even with the Australian enhancements, is now seen to be addressing only a minor part of the requirements for such a facility. As a consequence, it has now been superceded. The experimental facility was decommissioned in February, 1998.
Superceding the ICARIS BSR project is the BEACON project with a substantially different approach. BEACON is an Object Nexus (a linked and bonded collection of Business and Industrial Objects). This represents a major widening of scope and usefulness over the narrow focus of BSR, and a simple and highly effective solution to the significant control and retrieval problems peculiar to that approach.
In December 1996, the ISO/UN-ECE BSR Management Committee was disbanded when the UN-ECE pulled out. The project is now continuing under the control of an ISO ad hoc committee, having been endorsed at the subsequent meeting of the Technical Management Board of ISO.
ICARIS collaborated with the ISO ad hoc BSR committee during 1997. During the latter half of that year, ICARIS and ISO discussed the possiblities of adopting BEACON as an ISO standard in place of BSR. The problems of ensuring such a standards infrastructure could survive the ISO "consensus" approach and "standards" committees and still remain viable produced a result that was not acceptable to either ISO or ICARIS.
Responsibility for the BSR has since passed to the ISO Technical Committee TC154. A small group of EDI people are working to construct a BSR based on the EDIFACT EDI directories. In view of this origin, it will be interesting to see how useful the result is for applications at the business level.