ITU

OB editor documentation

Introduction for Data Entry Contributors

Thank you for volunteering to help with the migration of ITU Operational Bulletin archives!

Migration Process Overview

The process involves locating a historical OB-edition available in the old format (MS Word and/or PDF) on ITU’s website. Use the ITU OB Editor app to enter the data from that edition into the new data repository.

Submitting your changes

You will configure your copy of ITU OB Editor app to operate on your individual copy of ITU OB data. Changes made will go into that copy, after you make a few changes, you will request from the maintainers of ITU OB data repository to pull and review your changes.

Migration tutorials

The following pages describe migration steps in more detail:

More about ITU Operational Bulletin

ITU Operational Bulletin (OB) is a publication used for exchange of information about changes in International Telecommunication Networks and Services.

Q: Why does ITU OB exist?

ITU maintains a number of Recommendations, which are the standards adhered to by telecommunications equipment used across the planet. (to draw a simplified analogy, a Recommendation is similiar to a addressing system; each address has properties like a country name, city, street and building.)

Alongside each of those standards, ITU maintains various datasets that describe the specific details about each telecommunications provider who participates in the system. These datasets are distributed in the form of Service Publications. (To continue the above analogy, a Service Publication may be like an address book, describing how pieces of equipments can find one another.)

By following those Recommendation and Service Publications, Telecommunication Operators across the whole planet can interoperate with each other. This is how, for example, we can call any mobile phone number on the planet; even if that number is operated by a different company in another country.

Operational Bulletin aggregates changes to Recommendations and Service Publications, helping Telecommunications Operators and other participants to keep up-to-date with the latest state of affairs and avoid the breakdown of communications.

Q: Why is it being migrated?

Historically, ITU Operation Bulletin has been a periodic publication, with a new issue coming out every couple of weeks. ITU staff would gather notices from various telecommunications providers, compile those changes together into a Microsoft Word document, and upload it to ITU website.

This solution is far from being efficient, to offer a more effective solution, the new program ITU OB is being migrated to a new structured format. This allows ITU OB issues in HTML, MS Word and PDF formats to be generated automatically, which allows ITU to offer a machine-readable feed of OB messages.

Q: How is ITU OB structured?

Each edition of Operational Bulletin contains the following:

  1. A table of relevant Service Publication positions (also called Annexed Lists) that were previously annexed.
  2. A number of messages, splits into two sections:
    1. In “General Messages”: each message contains information related to their respective ITU Recommendation.
      Example messages: “Telephone Service”, “Service Restrictions”, etc.
    2. In “Amendments”: Each message contains changes made to a specific Annexed Service Publication, since the previous ITU OB edition was released.
  3. Fresh Service Publication positions annexed to this issue, if any.