EPPML

Last updated August 01, 2019

EPPML (Extensible Postal Product Model and Language) is a conceptual model for the interactions between parties of a postal communication system. Examples of such parties are mailers, posts, mail aggregators, providers of postal services and equipment and recipients. They create, publish, consume and deliver postal products.

The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal systems have generally been established as government monopolies, with a fee on the article prepaid. Proof of payment is often in the form of adhesive postage stamps, but postage meters are also used for bulk mailing. Modern private postal systems are typically distinguished from national postal agencies by the names "courier" or "delivery service".

The central concept of EPPML is the postal product. EPPML defines the structure and meaning for the information that represents a postal product. The postal product definition may be viewed as an interface between posts, their customers and other parties. The formal representation of postal products allows automated systems to efficiently consume new postal products as they are introduced by postal operators.

The current implementation of EPPML is based on XML technology, but the EPPML concepts may be implemented with other technologies (e.g. relational databases, semantic web). Each postal product is fully represented by one (and only one) postal product definition file (PPDF) which is an XML document. A PPDF must be valid under the EPPML schema.

A relational database is a digital database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A software system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Virtually all relational database systems use SQL for querying and maintaining the database.

The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards promote common data formats and exchange protocols on the Web, most fundamentally the Resource Description Framework (RDF). According to the W3C, "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries". The Semantic Web is therefore regarded as an integrator across different content, information applications and systems.

EPPML as a model of interaction

The 'M' in EPPML stands for Model. EPPML was defined by its authors as a model for the interaction between parties that create, publish, consume or deliver postal products.

The interactions defined by the model include actions on physical items, information exchanges and financial transactions. The typical action on a physical item is a change of location (e.g. delivery). The information exchanges may use either electronic channels (e.g. web services, email) or physical channels (e.g. bar codes printed on mail items by mailers and read posts). An example of a financial transaction is a refund for late delivery of a mail item.

The term Web service (WS) is either:

Barcode optical machine-readable representation of data

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A financial transaction is an agreement, or communication, carried out between a buyer and a seller to exchange an asset for payment.

EPPML as a markup language

The first practical implementation of EPPML relies on an XML schema to define the structure of the information that describes each postal product. The use of the XML schema makes EPPML a markup language for defining postal products. This is the reason why EPPML is sometimes referred to as Extensible Postal Product Markup Language.

An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constraints are generally expressed using some combination of grammatical rules governing the order of elements, Boolean predicates that the content must satisfy, data types governing the content of elements and attributes, and more specialized rules such as uniqueness and referential integrity constraints.

In computer text processing, a markup language is a system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of paper manuscripts, which is traditionally written with a red or blue pencil on authors' manuscripts. In digital media, this "blue pencil instruction text" was replaced by tags, which indicate what the parts of the document are, rather than details of how they might be shown on some display. This lets authors avoid formatting every instance of the same kind of thing redundantly. It also avoids the specification of fonts and dimensions which may not apply to many users.

Postal Product Definition File (PPDF)

A postal product definition file (PPDF) is an XML document which fully describes a postal product. The PPDF contains all necessary and sufficient information for customers to purchase and use the product. The structure and meaning of the XML elements in a PPDF is defined by an XML schema, known as EPPML schema.

EPPML Schema

The EPPML schema is an XML Schema which provides sufficient information for postal operators to generate postal product definition files to describe all aspects of their postal products, both existing and new. The EPPML schema also provides information necessary and sufficient for mailing equipment providers to create automated mailing systems capable of using postal product definition files for all mailer's activities, including postal product selection, the production of mail units compatible with new postal products and requesting new features of postal products.

The EPPML schema is an Universal Postal Union standard, UPU S54. The standard contains a complete description of the EPPML schema, its hierarchical structure, information types and semantics of its elements.

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References

DESIGNING AND USING PRODUCTS IN THE EPPML- ENABLED OPEN INNOVATION ENVIRONMENT (pg 188) in Handbook of Worldwide Postal Reform (Edited by Michael Crew, Crew, M.A. Kleindorfer, P.R. Campbell Jr.) Published by Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009, ISBN 1-84720-957-2, ISBN 978-1-84720-957-3
Overview of EPPML at POSTCOM
EPPML concepts presented at UPU Forum, December 5, 2007, Bern, Switzerland
UPU Standards Board status 0 proposal

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