Invitation to comment on Universal Business Language v2.4 before call for consent as OASIS Standard

By Paul Knight2 Apr 2024

Public review ends May 26th

OASIS and the OASIS Universal Business Language TC [1] are pleased to announce that Universal Business Language Version 2.4 is now available for public review and comment.

UBL is the leading interchange format for business documents. It is designed to operate within a standard business framework such as ISO/IEC 15000 (ebXML) to provide a complete, standards-based infrastructure that can extend the benefits of existing EDI systems to businesses of all sizes. The European Commission has declared UBL officially eligible for referencing in tenders from public administrations, and in 2015 UBL was approved as ISO/IEC 19845:2015.

Specifically, UBL provides:
– A suite of structured business objects and their associated semantics expressed as reusable data components and common business documents.
– A library of schemas for reusable data components such as Address, Item, and Payment, the common data elements of everyday business documents.
– A set of schemas for common business documents such as Order, Despatch Advice, and Invoice that are constructed from the UBL library components and can be used in generic procurement and transportation contexts.

UBL v2.4 is a minor revision to v2.3 that preserves backwards compatibility with previous v2.# versions. It adds new document types, bringing the total number of UBL business documents to 93.

The TC received three Statements of Use from Efact, Google, and Semantic [3].

The candidate specification and related files are available here:

Universal Business Language Version 2.4
Committee Specification 01
17 October 2023

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specification and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file at:
docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cs01-UBL-2.4/UBL-2.4.zip

Members of the UBL TC [1] approved this specification by Special Majority Vote [2]. The specification had been released for public review as required by the TC Process [4].

Public Review Period

The 60-day public review starts 28 March 2024 at 00:00 UTC and ends 26 May 2024 at 23:59 UTC.

This is an open invitation to comment. OASIS solicits feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of its technical work.

Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person directly at:
Technical-Committee-Comments@oasis-open.org

Comments submitted by for this work and for other work of this TC are publicly archived and can be viewed at:
https://groups.google.com/a/oasis-open.org/g/technical-committee-comments/
link to previous comments on UBL works: lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-comment

All comments submitted to OASIS are subject to the OASIS Feedback License, which ensures that the feedback you provide carries the same obligations at least as the obligations of the TC members. In connection with this public review of Universal Business Language Version 2.4 we call your attention to the OASIS IPR Policy [5] applicable especially [6] to the work of this technical committee. All members of the TC/OP should be familiar with this document, which may create obligations regarding the disclosure and availability of a member’s patent, copyright, trademark and license rights that read on an approved OASIS specification.

OASIS invites any persons who know of any such claims to disclose these if they may be essential to the implementation of the above specification, so that notice of them may be posted to the notice page for this TC’s work.

========== Additional references:
[1] OASIS Universal Business Language TC
https://groups.oasis-open.org/communities/tc-community-home2?CommunityKey=556949c8-dac8-40e6-bb16-018dc7ce54d6
former link: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/

[2] Approval ballot:
https://groups.oasis-open.org/higherlogic/ws/groups/556949c8-dac8-40e6-bb16-018dc7ce54d6/ballots/ballot?id=3818

[3] Links to Statements of Use

[4] History of publication, including previous public reviews:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/csd02-UBL-2.4/UBL-2.4-csd02-public-review-metadata.html

[5] https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/ipr/

[6] https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/ipr.php
https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/ipr/#RF-on-Limited-Mode
RF on Limited Terms Mode

The work of OASIS is supported by organizations from around the world. Members include: