Universal Business Language

Universal Business Language (UBL), ISO/IEC 19845, is an open library of standard electronic business documents and information models for supply chain, procurement, and transportation such as purchase orders, invoices, transport logistics and waybills. Originally developed by an 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.[1] It is designed to streamline information exchange through standardization, facilitating seamless connections between small, medium-sized, and large organization, thereby eliminating the re-keying of data and providing a comprehensive framework for electronic commerce.[2]

UBL is owned by OASIS and is available to all, with no royalty fees. The UBL semantic library is a well-developed information and data model with validators, authoring software, parsers and generators.[3] As of June 2021, the latest approved OASIS Standard is UBL Version 2.3,[4] which includes a total of 91 business document types. All UBL minor versions are fully backwards compatible back to UBL Version 2.0.

Originally tracing it origins back to the EDI standards and other derived XML standards,[5][6] UBL has evolved to include a broader range of syntaxes such as JSON, thereby enhancing global harmonization and interoperability. UBL now defines a syntax-neutral information model that can be restricted or extended to meet the requirements of particular industries, sectors, and communities, thus providing interoperability between systems and vendors when used as a generic interchange format.[7]

Ontologies are used to describe markup languages for business workflows. UBL is only one option to map e-business processes into an OWL description.[8]

  1. ^ UBL 2.0 implementation library Retrieved on 2009-12-21.
  2. ^ "UBL official homepage". Retrieved 2007-03-31.
  3. ^ Article by Tim Bray: "Don’t Invent XML Languages" Retrieved on 2007-05-29.
  4. ^ "Universal Business Language Version 2.3"
  5. ^ "On UBL (an overview)". Retrieved 2008-02-09.
  6. ^ "History of UBL | UBL XML.org". ubl.xml.org. Retrieved 2017-01-11.
  7. ^ "OASIS Technical Committee | Charter". www.oasis-open.org. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  8. ^ Magdalenic, Ivan and Vrdoljak, Boris and Schatten, Markus (2010). Mapping of core components based e-business standards into ontology. Research Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research. Springer. pp. 95–106. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-16552-8_10.{{cite conference}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)