D2.3: Models

 

Customer information with CIQ

CIQ (OASIS Customer Information Quality) aims at delivering global, application-independent, open XML specifications for party/customer information and profile management. It is still under construction. 

The objective of CIQ (OASIS Customer Information Quality) is to deliver a set of XML specifications for defining and managing customer (also called "Party") information/profile (including customer/party relationships) that are open, vendor neutral, application independent and importantly, "Global". 

The definition of "Global" here means that the CIQ family of specifications are designed to handle customer/party data (eg. name and address) of any country at an abstract (simple representation of data) or detailed (complex representation, i.e. breaking the data into atomic elements) level. 

A customer/party can be one or more persons or organisations. An organisation can be a private/public company, educational institute (e.g., school, college, University), association, club, not for profit, government, consortium, group, etc. 

To achieve interoperability of customer/party information within and across an organisation, the optimal approach is to use a "single base customer/party information standard" throughout the organisation to define and represent customer/party data that can support different application requirements (e.g., parsing, matching, validation, verification, postal services, profiling, billing, shipping, customer views, customer relationships, customer segmentation, etc). This standard can then be extended to support specific application needs. 

Specification

The committee has developed three XML Standards for Customer Information/Profile Management: 

1. xNAL: extensible Name and Address Language
   To describe the name and the address of the person

2. xCIL: extensible Customer Information Language
   To describe the characteristics of the customer.

3. xCRL: extensible Customer Relationships Language
   To describe the relationship with this customer (such as transaction history)

 

 

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