The following are standards that are being developed:

• Carrier Product Descriptions
• Mailing System Capabilities
• Equipment Manufacturer Business Rule Interface
• Rates
• Mailer Business Rule Interface

Carrier Product Descriptions

Posts and other carriers (e.g., FEDEX, UPS) provide products and services for moving items from one place/person to another. The OpenMail™ Carrier Product Markup Language (CPML):  

• enables carrier products to be described in a uniform way
• is extensible enabling support of future carrier products
• is an enabler for an infrastructure that supports senders, recipients and carriers

In OpenMail™, posts and carriers are welcome to use their own specialized schemas provided that transformation to CPML documents can be achieved in a meaningful manner. For example, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) is currently working on a post-specific standard called  Extensible Postal Product Model and Language (EPPML) that is intended to be used by members of the UPU. OpenMail™ will accept product description documents that conform to EPPML, through adaptation to the CPML instance documents.

As the EPPML and other specialized standards emerge, content adapters will be added/updated, and documents that detail differences will be found here.

Support for Specialized Products Schemas

OpenMail™ support for EPPML

EPPML is currently listed as a level 0 UPU standard. The FMT will initially use the level 0 version to help vet the concept of product description transformation. As we get experience with such transformation, we will posts note  here. 

The EPPML documents can be obtained by your UPU representative.

Mailing System Capabilities (MSC)

The MSC is an extension of the W3C Delivery Context Ontology standard proposal. The MSC was developed to enable mailing systems to describe their capabilities to help enable automated content transformation as needed for the mailing system to consume information carried in interface documents.

The need for the MSC was discovered when the team began to prototype an application to enable ingestion of EPPML documents. 

 Equipment Manufacturer Business Rule Interface

This interface was identified but has not been developed. It will enable mailing systems to be customized based on business rules created by equipment manufacturers (e.g., did a customer pay for the use of the a particular service).

Rates Interface

To facilitate the updating of rates, a formal interface that can be used to describe how pricing is determined and applied will need to be developed. We have begun investigating such an interface and mechanisms for using the interface to produce pricing engines. 

  Mailer Business Rule Interface

This interface was identified but has not been developed. It will enable mailers (especially in enterprises) to customize the usage of carrier products (e.g., enable a manager to authorize a user to use a particular service, enable users to use customized pricing, etc).