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Oasis Committee Approves Universal Business Language 1.0 (UBL) Draft

Billerica, Massachusetts — May 4, 2004 — The Universal Business Language working group in conjunction with The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) has approved the Universal Business Language (UBL) 1.0 specification as an OASIS committee draft. Available for free with no licensing fees, UBL defines a high-level, modular XML data model for various business documents that can be extended to suit particular industry needs. The specification, which represented 6 years of development and 1 year of public review, is now ready for implementation in commercial and open-source software efforts

The UBL v1.0 release delivers a library of XML schemas for reusable data components, a small set of XML schemas for common business documents useful in a generic order-to-invoice trading context, and support for the customization of UBL in specific trading relationships. The UBL schemas are modular, reusable, and extensible in XML-aware ways. The UBL v1.0 Committee Draft release is currently being distributed for public review as a ZIP archive containing prose documentation, normative XML Schemas, UML diagrams, spreadsheet models, formatting specifications, sample instances, and other components.

Commenting on the significance of the new XML standard, Carlo Innocenti, Stylus Studio's senior product architect said: "The explosive growth of Industry Standard XML data models is concrete evidence demonstrating the strength and popularity of W3C XML Schema technologies. Using XML Schemas, data architects can leverage the collective domain expertise and technical knowledge of industry experts in various business fields by building XML-enabled enterprise applications around these well-engineered data models. Stylus Studio supports Industry XML Standards through [among other things] out-of-the-box support for OASIS Catalogs, including over 1,700 XML Schemas and DTD's, and a powerful XML schema designer that enables developers to further leverage the UBL standard by creating customized XML data models, through XML Schema's unique ability to import, include, redefine or extend upon pre-built XML schema data components."

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