Las Vegas, Nev. - The Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), Pearl River, N.Y., released the first component of the ACORD Standards Framework, the organization announced at its annual meeting this week. The framework, an initial content release (ICR) of the single business data/information dictionary, brings together three groups of information:
1. The insurance business terms from three ACORD domain standards (life & annuity, property & casualty/surety, and reinsurance/large commercial).
2. The business terms from the IBM intellectual property contribution.
3. A portion of the harmonized data dictionary released by ACORD, eEG7 and CSIO last year.
This is the first release of the dictionary and contains more than 10,000 identified business terms, definitions and mappings. Where possible, there has been a preliminary data harmonization to a single element name and definition for concepts such as "coverage," "party," or "claim." The goal is to issue the full-harmonized dictionary in Q3 2006 for validation and review by the membership.
The business data/information dictionary provides the technology neutral common vocabulary for the insurance industry and is the most critical component for interoperability with other standards organizations and proprietary company architectures. The dictionary is based upon the UN/CEFACT core components approach.
"As we announced early this year with the ACORD Standards Strategy, the ACORD Standards Framework is a way for our members to enhance their existing architecture and standards implementations while building business architectures that provide a consistent enterprise and industry view. Today's release is a crucial step to providing a common business vocabulary and lays the foundation for the development of other components," said Denise Garth, vice president, Membership and Standards, ACORD.
Garth also pointed out that, "the Dictionary is the heart of the ACORD Standards Framework and lays the groundwork for the informational needs of the business process models, business process service definitions, single data model, forms and messaging."
This initial content release is available to ACORD members on the members' only Web site.
Source: ACORD
