What is UBL?
UBL, the Universal Business Language, is the product of an
international effort to define a royalty-free library of standard
electronic XML business documents such as purchase orders and
invoices. Developed in an open and accountable OASIS Technical
Committee with participation from a variety of industry data
standards organizations, UBL is designed to plug directly into
existing business, legal, auditing, and records management
practices, eliminating the re-keying of data in existing fax- and
paper-based supply chains and providing an entry point into
electronic commerce for small and medium-sized
businesses.
Where did UBL come from?
The UBL initiative originated in efforts beginning in mid-1999
to create a set of standard XML "office documents"
within OASIS. The work of the OASIS OfficeDoc TC under the
leadership of Murray Altheim of Sun Microsystems was set aside
when OASIS and UN/CEFACT began collaboration on ebXML in December
1999. Interest in the creation of a standard XML syntax for basic
commercial documents revived again in May 2000 with the decision
in ebXML to omit a standard XML "payload" syntax from
the initial set of ebXML deliverables. The working group that came
to be known as UBL began in April 2001 as a discussion group
sponsored by CommerceNet and was established as an OASIS Technical
Committee in November 2001.
Where does UBL stand at this point?
UBL 1.0 was released as an OASIS Standard on 8 November 2004
following three years of open development and public review.
UBL 2.0, which greatly expands the scope of UBL, was approved
as an OASIS Standard in November 2006.
How can I get the UBL 2.0 package, and what's in it?
UBL 2.0 can be downloaded as a single zip archive from
http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/os-UBL-2.0.zip
The UBL 2.0 release package contains
- An explanatory introduction
- XML schemas for 31 basic business documents:
- ApplicationResponse
- AttachedDocument
- BillOfLading
- Catalogue
- CatalogueDeletion
- CatalogueItemSpecificationUpdate
- CataloguePricingUpdate
- CatalogueRequest
- CertificateOfOrigin
- CreditNote
- DebitNote
- DespatchAdvice
- ForwardingInstructions
- FreightInvoice
- Invoice
- Order
- OrderCancellation
- OrderChange
- OrderResponse
- OrderResponseSimple
- PackingList
- Quotation
- ReceiptAdvice
- Reminder
- RemittanceAdvice
- RequestForQuotation
- SelfBilledCreditNote
- SelfBilledInvoice
- Statement
- TransportationStatus
- Waybill
- A detailed description of the generic procurement and
transport processes within which the UBL document types are
designed to operate
- A library of over a thousand XML data elements based on the
ebXML Core Components Technical Specification (ISO 15000-5)
- A brief description of the UBL development methodology
- UML diagrams of the complete UBL data model
- Excel and ODF spreadsheets showing the data models of
each of the UBL documents and the UBL component library
- UBL Naming and Design Rules specifying the generation of UBL
schemas from the UBL data models
- XML specifications of default values for all code lists used
in UBL
- An ASN.1 specification for UBL documents in binary form
The UBL 2.0 Support Page provides a wealth of other materials
to aid in the development of UBL applications.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ubl-ssc
Where can I discuss UBL with other users?
The publicly subscribable OASIS ubl-dev list provides a free
forum for questions and comments regarding UBL. The ubl-dev
archive is located at
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-dev/
Subscriptions to ubl-dev can be made through the OASIS list
manager at
http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/index.php
UBL 2.0 is amazingly advanced for the work of a
volunteer technical committee. How did that happen?
An important and controversial early decision of the UBL TC was
to base its work on an existing set of XML business
schemas. Instead of starting from scratch, the UBL TC accepted the
contribution by CommerceOne and SAP of an already widely deployed
commercial XML business vocabulary, xCBL 3.0.
The decision to begin with xCBL was based on four key
considerations. First, xCBL 3.0 was a mature XML specification
already used in a number of ecommerce marketplaces. Second, xCBL
was based on a component library model, ensuring much better
alignment among document types derived from the library than had
been the case with older message standards in which the different
document types were developed independently. Third, xCBL had been
published under terms that allowed the free creation of derivative
works. And fourth, CommerceOne and SAP were willing to back up
their contribution with technical resources that supported much of
UBL's early development.
UBL has since evolved independently to the point where its
origins in xCBL can no longer be recognized, but the decision to
begin with an already successful specification gave UBL a
three-year head start that it continues to enjoy today. At this
point, UBL 2.0 represents over eight years of continuous
development in the creation of a standard XML business
syntax.
Who owns UBL?
UBL is owned by OASIS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
the open development of public XML standards. UBL is maintained by
an OASIS Technical Committee made up of XML and business
experts.
How much will it cost to use UBL?
The simple answer is that UBL is royalty-free. It can be used
without charge by anyone.
More precisely, the UBL TC operates in the OASIS Intellectual
Property Rights (IPR) mode known as "Royalty Free on Limited
Terms," which "requires all Obligated Parties to license their
Essential Claims using the RF licensing elements described in
Sections 10.2.1 and 10.2.3" of the OASIS IPR Policy, a copy of
which can be found at
http://www.oasis-open.org/who/intellectualproperty.php
UBL claims to be "universal," but its
definitions of business terms are all written in English. How can
people who don't speak English understand UBL documents?
Most people will interact with UBL documents using software
that automatically presents the relevant information through a
localized interface, so the important question here is how UBL can
be made usable for software designers and business analysts. To
meet their needs, UBL Localization Subcommittees have translated
the UBL 1.0 definitions and business terms into Chinese
(Simplified and Traditional),
Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Italian; the results are available as the
UBL 1.0 International Data Dictionary at
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/19298/wd-UBL-1.0-IDD-2.ods
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/19299/wd-UBL-1.0-IDD-2.xls
Work on preparation of the UBL 2.0 IDD is well underway, with draft
versions already available in Spanish and Italian.
In what ways does UBL support an incremental transition
from paper-based trade to electronic trade?
UBL is a strongly document-centric approach to electronic
commerce that focuses on standardizing business data in a way that
maps easily to traditional printed forms. The primary
international standard for the printed forms of traditional
documents is the UN Layout Key, which for more than 40 years has
served as the model for documents used in international trade. A
mapping of all the UBL documents to their equivalent UN Layout
Keys is provided as part of the UBL 1.0 release. Free UBL 1.0
XSL-FO stylesheets and an XSL-FO stylesheet processor are
available from Crane
Softwrights (http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/links/res-ublo.htm)
to convert UBL 1.0 documents to their Layout Key equivalents in
HTML and PDF form,
and free Java software based on the Crane library is available
from Ambrosoft (http://ambrosoft.com/) to
directly transform any UBL document into HTML files conformant to
the UN Layout Key.
Work is underway to create stylesheet support for the
subset of UBL 2.0 documents that have UN Layout Key
equivalents.
How does UBL address the legal aspects of paperless
trade?
A key objective of UBL from the beginning has been to provide
the world with standards for the electronic versions of
traditional business documents designed in a way that recognizes
established commercial and legal practices. Implementing
international paperless trade will require extensive cooperation
among nations to institute uniform legal codes governing the
substitution of electronic documents for their paper
equivalents. UBL's contribution to this effort lies in the
definition of a standard set of XML forms and close cooperation
with the organizations working toward the establishment of an
international ecommerce infrastructure.
Since December 2001, UBL has been on the standing agenda of the
ISO IEC ITU UN/ECE eBusiness MoU Management Group, of which OASIS
is a nonvoting member. This group manages relationships regarding
electronic business standards among the organizations referenced
by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). OASIS is
also a Class A Liaison to ISO TC 154, which is responsible for the
international standardization of electronic document syntaxes such
as EDIFACT. It has long been the intention of the UBL TC to request the
submission of UBL to ISO subsequent to its approval as an OASIS
Standard.
What is the relationship of UBL to ebXML?
The impetus to begin the UBL TC came from the desire of a
number of ebXML participants to define a standard XML payload
format for ebXML — that is, an XML counterpart to traditional EDI
standards such as X12 and EDIFACT. As described further at
ebxml.org, the ebXML suite of specifications, many of them now
standardized as ISO 15000, provides a complete, next-generation
XML-based infrastructure that enables EDI functionality over the
free Internet. UBL provides a standard data format for the
messages to be exchanged in such an infrastructure. However, UBL
is designed to be "agnostic" with respect to the
infrastructure, and UBL messages can be used in a very wide range
of functional contexts, from complex service-oriented
architectures (SOAs) to the simple exchange of documents via
email.
What is the relationship of UBL to ebXML Core
Components?
UBL is the first international standards body implementation of
the ebXML Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS 2.01, aka
ISO 15000-5). The UBL library consists of ebXML CCTS Business
Information Entities (BIEs). UBL XML schemas are defined through
the application of UBL Naming and Design Rules (NDRs) to an
underlying data model mapped to the Core Component types. UBL is
also currently working with UN/CEFACT to converge the UBL library
with the emerging UN/CEFACT Core Component library.
What is the relationship of UBL to UN/CEFACT?
UN/CEFACT is the international agency responsible for trade
facilitation and EDI standards. Together, UN/CEFACT and OASIS
developed ebXML.
Consistent with the Cooperation Agreement between OASIS and
UN/CEFACT of June 2005, a collaboration statement has been issued
by OASIS and UN/CEFACT that states:
- UN/CEFACT recognizes UBL 2 as appropriate first-generation XML documents for eBusiness.
- For OASIS and UN/CEFACT:
- future UN/CEFACT deliverables constitute the upgrade
path for UBL, and
- the maintenance of UBL 2 remains with the OASIS UBL TC.
- In the expectation that UN/CEFACT will produce its own
integrated set of XML schemas within a period of three
years, OASIS will produce no further major versions of UBL
past UBL 2.
- OASIS will grant UN/CEFACT a perpetual, irrevocable license
to create derivative works based on UBL.
This UN recognition means that anyone requiring XML documents
for eBusiness may safely adopt UBL as a suitable basis for now and
into the future.
What differentiates UBL from apparently similar efforts
such as RosettaNet and OAGIS?
There are some similarities between UBL and other XML business
data initiatives, but taken together, UBL's attributes make it
unique.
- UBL was developed in a completely open, publicly visible,
vendor-neutral, royalty-free standards process that allows input
from the entire user community -- not just big corporate players
who can afford to pay hefty consortium fees. You don't have to
sign a non-disclosure agreement to work with or talk about
UBL!
- Many of the currently available XML business vocabularies are
optimized to support the business requirements of specific
vertical industries. UBL is designed to work across domains,
making it ideally suited to the needs of users such as governments
that must impose a standard format upon trading partners in
multiple industries.
- UBL is the first standard to be based on the ebXML Core
Components Technical Specification (ISO 15000-5).
- UBL is also completely up-to-date with regard to schema
technology and library design. The UBL schema Naming and Design
Rules, developed by a world-class group of XML schema experts,
have been widely adopted and copied by other XML definition
efforts. And the component library approach to document definition
puts UBL miles ahead of older efforts in which the various
document types were defined in isolation.
- To reduce the job of ecommerce standardization to manageable
proportions, UBL strongly differentiates the data standardization
problem from the process standardization problem. UBL focuses on
the standardization of business data as the first step toward
global ecommerce integration, leaving the standardization of
business processes to user communities and assuming that process
definition will be addressed in a separate layer of the stack. A
side benefit of this approach is to make UBL usable with the
widest possible range of process definition technologies.
- To provide a bridge between traditional paper-based workflows
and electronic commerce, UBL is strongly document-centric,
preserving transparency for human users and easily mapping to
processes based on the exchange of legally binding instruments. To
put it another way, UBL is focused on the "public space"
between enterprises rather than the "private space"
within enterprises, and it is therefore better tuned for
open-ended B2B exchanges than are schema libraries designed for
internal application integration.
To sum up, UBL does not seek to compete with any existing XML
business vocabularies but rather to meet a set of needs that are
not being adequately met by any of them.
How does UBL cope with the need for customization to
meet different business requirements?
In many small-business environments, standard forms can satisfy
business requirements well enough to be used without
modification. The existence of standard paper forms such as the UN
Layout Key proves this. In these environments, UBL can work right
out of the box.
It is true, however, that different industries have different
data requirements, and this has led in the past to the
proliferation of variants even in such tightly controlled
standards as X12, EDIFACT, and RosettaNet.
UBL does not attempt a complete solution to this problem but
instead takes an extremely pragmatic approach that should allow
satisfactory solutions in the great majority of real-world cases.
For example, each UBL 2.0 schema contains an optional extension
area in which trading partners may, by agreement, include any data
not already covered by the very extensive predefined UBL data
structure. Maintaining this extension area and coordinating its
use is, of course, the responsibility of the trading partners.
But this simple strategy allows nearly unlimited flexibility in
individual trading relationships without requiring modification of
the standard UBL schemas.
What else is new in UBL 2.0?
Aside from the new extension area, the biggest change in UBL
2.0 is the addition of 23 new document types to accommodate
extended procurement scenarios and basic transport processes.
Development of these new schemas was funded directly and
indirectly by the governments of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, England,
Finland, Iceland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States.
This practical input makes UBL 2.0 ideally suited for government
procurement and basic international trade.
UBL 2.0 also features an answer to the problem of code list
management. Instead of binding default code list values directly
into the document schemas, which makes trading-partner-specific
adjustment of code lists virtually impossible, UBL 2.0 expresses
code list values in separate files using the new genericode
format. The default values are then used to generate an XSLT
script that validates the code values independent of the standard
schemas. This two-phase approach not only solves most code list
management problems; it also allows different code list subsets to
be associated with different contexts in the same document
instance, provides great flexibility in specifying the code values
accepted in each trading relationship, and establishes a platform
for sophisticated business rule implementation — all without
modifying the standard UBL 2.0 schemas. The UBL 2.0 release
includes a complete set of open-source software modules for
demonstrating the new two-phase validation strategy.
Has UBL been successful in real-world implementations?
Since February 2005, use of the UBL Invoice standard has been
mandated by law for all public-sector business in Denmark. 1.2
million UBL invoices are currently exchanged in Denmark every
month. The Danish Ministry of Finance estimates savings to the
government of 100 million euros annually from use of this one
document type. With the introduction of their OIOUBL
initiative in 2007, these savings are estimated to double. The
adoption of OIOUBL affects 440,000 businesses in Denmark and is
now in the process of forcing UBL support from every company that
sells business software in Northern Europe.
Beginning in October 2005, "Swed-invoice" (a subset of UBL
Invoice) has been recommended for all government use by the
Swedish National Financial Management Authority. The NFMA estimates
that standardization on UBL Invoice will save the Swedish
government SEK 4 billion (more than 500 million dollars) in the
first five years of deployment.
As part of the Northern European cooperation on e-commerce and
e-procurement, representatives from Denmark, Sweden, Norway,
Finland, Iceland, and the UK have set up a working group for
developing a Northern European
subset (NES) of UBL 2.0 documents. The purpose of the NES is
to facilitate harmonization of different types of e-procurement
documents in countries that are already using UBL or that are
considering using UBL 2.0 documents. This provides an opportunity
to base e-procurement documents and processes on a coordinated NES
subset.
In May 2007, CEN/ISSS, the pan-European standards organization
for ebusiness, established a Workshop on "Business
Interoperability Interfaces on Public Procurement in Europe," also
known as WS/BII. The starting point for the Workshop is the NES
and CODICE (Spanish) customizations of UBL.
The Electronic Freight Management (EFM) project of the
U.S. Department of Transportation is currently undergoing testing
using the UBL Transportation Status, Despatch Advice, and Receipt
Advice. This pilot project links two Chinese apparel
manufacturers, two freight forwarders, an air cargo terminal
operator, two charter air carriers, a U.S. buyer of apparel, a
U.S. 3PL, and an import broker in a complex demonstration of
state-of-the-art electronic commerce in a real-world setting.
Since UBL is publicly available and royalty-free, it is
impossible to track implementations below the national level.
However, it is expected that current and pending government
initiatives will quickly establish UBL as a common format for all
ordinary business transactions.
Is the UBL effort still open to participation?
Yes! Anyone interested in the further development of UBL
should join OASIS and sign up for the UBL TC. OASIS memberships
are available at the following URL:
http://www.oasis-open.org/join/
