Orchestrating a harmonious system

Orchestrating a harmonious system

by MM Park, J Wallace, and IP Williamson

published Victorian Law Institute Journal, vol 83(5) pp 50-53 (May 2009)

ABSTRACT: the authors consider those changes to the Victorian Torrens system necessary or desirable to assist in bringing about an Australian harmonised (or even a uniform) system of land title registration.

Article

NECS and Web Services

In this NECSpress we tell you more about work being done to define the requirements for system-to-system communications in NECS.

Industry stakeholders have made it clear that for NECS to be of value to them its functions must be accessible by Web Services from the outset. Web Services is the means by which NECS is integrated with the in-house case management and documentation systems used by conveyancing industry participants. It is an alternative to a person using a web browser to access NECS and it is expected that the majority of transactions completed using NECS will use Web Services.

NECS is an industry system that relies for its viability on being suitable for use by a wide range of independent users with different systems. Those systems include purpose-built systems and proprietary systems supplied and maintained by third parties, many of which are already using Web Services to communicate with other external systems.

Implementation of Web Services in an environment of many independent users and systems requires standardisation of both the content of messages exchanged between systems (Data Standard Requirements) and the means by which the messages are exchanged (Web Services Requirements). Without such standardisation NECS would have to be provisioned to service a large number of existing different Web Services implementations and message content interpretations which would significantly affect its viability and implementation time, and make it a very fragile system in operation.

Standardisation of the content and means of exchange of Web Services messages requires all parties to collaborate in developing standards that all parties can implement with the minimum amount of alteration, re-testing and re-commissioning of existing systems. This work cannot be done without extensive stakeholder involvement and input.

Data Standard Requirements

Standardisation of the content of messages is the purpose of the National Electronic Conveyancing Data Standard (NECDS) being developed with the Lending Industry XML Initiative Ltd (LIXI). Read about this work here.

A Working Group of LIXI members under the direction of a specially convened Management Group has developed draft requirements for the NECDS and most recently a single, controlled vocabulary for terms used in the NECS environment, including wherever possible their synonyms used in the various States and Territories. If you are a LIXI member you can access the requirements documentation here and the NECS Vocabulary here.

Late last year the National Office with the assistance of Ajilon Australia Pty Ltd reviewed the draft requirements and supplemented them with a Message Use Case Specification. The requirements documentation consists of separate Operations and Administration & Maintenance requirements for NECS/Land Registry and Industry/NECS transactions and the Message Use Case Specification covers all four requirement sets. All of these documents are available for review and feedback here.

These documents are drafts and are currently being reviewed by stakeholders. Following the review, it is expected that a first draft of the XML schema for NECS/Land Registry transactions will be commissioned.

Web Services Requirements

Standardisation of the means by which messages are exchanged between systems will allow NECS to communicate efficiently and reliably with the wide range of systems used by industry and government participants. Defining the most suitable requirements for Web Services in the NECS environment allows industry participants to get their systems ready for communicating with NECS. Read more about the reasons for this work here.

In February 2009, the National Office commissioned Saratoga Professional Services Pty Ltd to consult with industry participants and define the technical and commissioning requirements for Web Services connecting NECS to external systems. Saratoga undertook extensive stakeholder consultation and developed requirements set out in the report dated August 2009 available here.

In November 2009, the National Office commissioned Ajilon Australia Pty Ltd to extend and clarify the Web Services requirements necessary for the NECS environment. Ajilon’s report dated February 2010 is available here.

If you are interested in the definition of Web Services in environments characterised by a diverse range of independent users and systems and would like to comment on any of the work done to date, we would like to hear from you here.

Verisign makes outlandish claims about EC's performance

Verisign, an American company providing digital signing technology to Land Victoria's Electronic Conveyancing project has published a case study. There is not just the usual positive spin, but the case study makes some specific outlandish claims which are either just porky pies or I would be happy to personally challenge ECV / Verisign to a public demonstration to prove you cannot lodge a caveat electronically in 4 - 7 minutes.

The case study, page 4, verbatim says -

We’ve introduced electronic caveats — the process of issuing a financial lien on a property—the online processing of these is substantially faster than the legacy process; 4 to 7 minutes versus the time taken by an individual to travel to the office and wait in a queue to manually lodge the paper documents.”

My personal experience as a subscriber is that you cannot lodge an electronic caveat in any less than 20 minutes. Here's a link to the screen shots for an actual case study of lodging a caveat ECV style. Dont be put off by the 57 screen shots, because that is what it takes. The last time I lodged a caveat electronically, it took precisely 26 minutes. Whilst you are counting the screen shots, ask yourself why am I digitally signing this transaction no less than 3 times?

After lodging a few caveats electronically, our legal practice has reverted to the old fashioned of lodging paper caveats, which by our experience takes just 2-3 minutes. Print, check, sign, lodge by post.

The case study goes on to make other unsubstantiated claims, such as the potential cost savings of $235 to $395 per transaction. If caveats are any guide, which they are, and caveats are the simplest Land Registry transaction to perform, I am simply overwhelmed by the cost savings / time savings claim.

Brett Hayton
Hayton Kosky Lawyers

Do we really need to speak the same language?

Business-to-business integration (B2Bi) is old-hat. A robust technology to allow the systems of two (or more) business to be integrated. An archetypal example is a direct purchase order/invoicing system between business customers and their suppliers. In these transactions, orders and invoices are being exchanged automatically and electronically, the relevant data fields being extracted and populated into the relevant ERPS and other databases on each side. Simple stuff and relatively easy to achieve, once both parties agree on the channels and the document structures that are sent to each other (the ‘language’).

The challenges with this approach arise when you have many-to-many relationships in a business ecosystem with lots of different suppliers and customers. Some solutions arise by mandate – the sheer market grunt of one or a few big players that dictate to everyone else what the rules are. But without such a driving force, you either need everyone to agree on some common standards for describing things like purchase orders and invoices, or you have to engineer custom parsing B2B interfaces for each relationship. Or, you just live with the friction and continue processing a subset of your orders via email or fax.

In the case of ‘common standards’, the example of purchase orders and invoices seems achievable universally, because they are items that are, in their most raw forms, common to every business. While such standards might exist in certain industry pockets (RosettaNet for the chip manufacturing industry comes to mind), there is no universal standard for ecommerce transactions. Furthermore, the challenge becomes even more interesting (to us, at least!) when you go beyond the ‘simple’ of purchase orders and invoices to the ‘complex’ – other types of business forms processing.

The home loan and conveyancing industry sectors, groups with which we’ve had some involvement already, are ecosystems in which the electronic exchanges are far more fiddly and fraught than online purchase order processing. The National Electronic Conveyancing System (NECS) will attempt to address some of the efficiency needs in Australia. In this case you have seven or eight state jurisdictional land titles offices, each with their own similar-but-different language for describing business activities, such as transfer of land title ownership. One NECS approach could be to mandate that all state offices use the same language for common transactions. But this would require massive and disruptive changes within those agencies, some of which have been processing documents their own way for over a hundred years.

A more palatable alternative is to let the agencies continue to maintain their own language and create an 8-way dictionary - a giant look-up table, or “universal translator” that supports not only human readability, but (eventually) software integration as well. While a thorough and robust solution would accommodate modern semantic techniques and standards, it is a simple concept and certainly achievable.


Reprint from
FRICTIONLESS BUSINESS ECOSYSTEMS - NICTA