The scope of this cookbook is to meet the following objectives:

• To help you get started with the process that can guide you through a successful development of a CICA-compliant XML Schema.

• To serve as the Cook book for CICA development which is a business message architecture that provides a single approach to business message development that facilitates a common reusable vocabulary across multiple industries. It also creates an environment for convergence with other standards organizations, industry associations or data content committees. The CICA architectural framework serves as the foundation that protects your investment in business content development by creating a reusable common structure that can be expressed in a variety of syntaxes, for example, XML schema, industry specific implementation guides, ASC X12 EDI transaction sets or future markup languages. The CICA architecture and the ASC X12 organization provide a mature environment to protect and enhance your company's investment in electronic business-to-business data exchange. The keys to CICA's functionality and flexibility are modularity and reusability. CICA implementations formulate data into reusable context-independent components that are stored in a repository. At their simplest level, CICA components are the generic objects of the business process, such as a name or date. As these components are inserts into their appropriate place within the process, they acquire specific meaning, e.g. the "purchaser's name" or the "date of birth." Since CICA data is built only one time, components can be reused to fulfill a myriad of business data exchange needs. The same CICA data structures can be used for insurance, finance, health care, transportation or in any other industry that exchanges business data. The components are easily used by different development organizations, reducing development time and promoting convergence of business vocabularies into a broadly accepted set of common components.