Progress
On March 19, 2001, an initial meeting of FTA, MTC, and wireless industry
representatives took place designed to outline an understanding of the tasks
to be performed by the organizations and to develop a timeline for completion.
A subsequent teleconference call was conducted among the parties on April 25.
As first steps, it was determined to (1) circulate a survey to Wireless committee
member states requesting information on their use of GIS, (2) to identify vendors
providing GIS and related services that may be helpful relative to the creation
of a data format standard, and (3) address a letter to the ANSI organization
describing the FTA/MTC effort and requesting support. These were accomplished.
Based on initial progress, the committee next (1) requested responses to a refined survey from all states, specifically asking for GIS formats in current use, (2) solicited the participation of vendors in the next meeting to assist the committee's understanding of how current services are provided and how a national standard may be best developed, and (3) met with ANSI representatives to establish organizational jurisdiction and approval timelines necessary to meet the Mobile Telecommunications Sourcing Act deadline (June 2002).
Timeline
In a May 2001 contact, the Standards Manager - ASC X12/Data Interchange Standards
Association outlined the following relative to meeting dates and the standards
approval process. Trimester X12 Meetings take place the first week of October,
February, and June. Submissions for maintenance or new standards must be put
in prior to the next following meeting, and must be submitted no later than
3 weeks after a Trimester meeting to be considered for the next ballot cycle.
They are then reviewed by a Technical Assessment Committee first for compliance
with the Standards and Rules for development, syntax, etc., then if approved
are moved forward for a 45-day ballot of the membership.
The most appropriate ballot cycle opportunity for X12 approval of Wireless standards work would be targeted at the February 2002 cycle, with Project Proposal submission in October 2001. Technical Assessment would conduct its review in December.
Caveat: ASC X12 does not "approve database formats". The creation of national-standard data elements, or external Dictionary references to code sources that contain such data elements maintained by other organizations (such as FTA or MTC), that may be used in and necessary to build a database format, are within the purview of X12, however.
Wireless Task Group tasks were to:
Once completed, the necessary standards would be present in the ANSI ASC X12 Data Dictionary for the states to use for determination of a location associated with a taxing jurisdiction. (Additionally the Committee might propose a suggested uniform proprietary data layout to the states using the established data elements.)
As a start, the X12 Data Dictionary was examined to compare it to the draft data format strawman supplied by a state currently implementing a tax jurisdcition sourcing process to see what data element correspondences there were, and what items were missing, that needed to be proposed by the Wireless Committee for inclusion in it.
In Spokane, Washington, on August 15, the group met and reviewed a draft strawman format, made alterations, and developed plans to circulate the draft to the wireless industry and to propose it as an X12 standard during the October 1-4 ASC X12/TIGERS meeting in Miami, FL. Soon after, a draft Transaction Set format was devised to facilitate X12 consideration and approval.
X12/TIGERS Involvement
The ASC X12 sub-organization that has dominion over consideration of the
Transaction Set is the Government Subcommittee - Task Group 2 (Tax)/TIGERS (Tax
Information Group for E-commerce Requirements Standardization).
In October 2001 at the regular ASC X12 meeting, the transaction, now called the Tax Jurisdiction Sourcing Transaction Set, was forwarded to the ASC X12 organization for consideration by Task Group 2 (Tax)/TIGERS.
There the draft EDI transaction set to be used with the MTSA was redesigned in order to make it more usable as EDI by allowing multiple address inquires within a single transaction. With those changes, it passed the Government Subcommittee, and will go to X12 Technical Assessment in December.