XML Business Document Library (XBDL)
The purpose of the project is to provide a migration path for established legacy EDI semantics and associated business process
artifact dictionaries containing codes, elements and message semantics to a Standard Library of XML business grammatical components.
These XML business artifacts and document structures will allow trading partners to unambiguously identify the business content to
be exchanged in a specific business context. These business artifacts and content will also fully utilize all aspects of ebXML
based interchanges. For SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) partners this will provide "jump start kits" for basic adoption of ebXML
based transactions and interactions. A further goal will be to provide a model to facilitate interoperability between XML based
vocabularies where these are already aligned on an existing EDI base.
Electronic Business artifacts from existing UN/EDIFACT semantic dictionaries, including existing harmonization and simplification
efforts, such as Simpl-edi and Simpl-eb. To harmonize as far as practical with the Core Component work from Phase 1 of ebXML,
including the work of the Joint Core Components initiative, and with the work of other standards or industry efforts in this area.
The project deliverables are:
Standard Library of XML business grammatical components, including nouns, verbs and context rules for business document structures
and their associated content semantics.
Rules for the generation of context-specific schemas for basic business documents and their components through the application of
transformation and assembly rules from a common XML source library stored in an ebXML Registry system.
3. Functional Expertise of Membership
The XML Business Document Library project team is a group of experts with broad knowledge in the area of Electronic Business (ebXML,
UN/EDIFACT, and national EDI/eBusiness), ebXML Core Components, semantic and context related development.
Each UN/CEFACT head of delegation may designate one or more experts to the project team. In doing so, they may delegate this task
to one or more organizations, which may be national, regional or international. Experts are expected to contribute to the work based
solely on their expertise.
The following contributions are submitted as part of this proposal. It is understood that these are only for consideration by the
project team and that other participants may submit their own contributions in order to ensure the gathering of as much information
as possible from those with expertise and a material interest in the project but at the same time allow diverse voices to comment
on the details of the projects and ensures that no single organization can dominate the process:
UN/CEFACT's "Simpl-edi/eb" documents.
UN/CEFACT's Simpl-edi ad-hoc Working Group output documents.
UN/CEFACT's Alignment Dictionary output documents.
ebXML's Core Component Example Library.
NOTE: The submittors of this proposal encourage all standards or industry efforts that have performed work in this area to submit
their specifications to this project as a initial contribution. This will ensure that this project team will create the single
global solution enabling interoperability amongst all users that want to use simple XML documents for business information exchange
as a bridge between EDI and ebXML.
Statement of resource requirements
Participants in the project shall provide resources for their own participation. The existence and functioning of the project shall
not require any additional resources from the UN/ECE secretariat.