The standardization of electronic business Extensible Markup Language (ebXML) promises to revolutionize the way companies partner and conduct business. The initiative, sponsored by the standards bodies United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), has produced a modular suite of XML specifications that enables enterprises of any size or location to conduct business over the Internet.

The ebXML Technical Architecture Team, whose goal is "to develop the technical architecture that will encompass ebXML and commit the architecture to paper", announced version 0.6 of its specification draft.

At issue is a Web standard called Electronic Business XML, or ebXML, which allows companies in many industries to communicate over the Web. It was a standard created by a United Nations organization and by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or OASIS, a consortium of tech companies that includes IBM, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems and Hewlett-Packard.

The OASIS interoperability group Monday has finally ratified the ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement (CPPA) v2.0 as an OASIS Open Standard, making the protocol law in the consortium.

Until recently, Web services applications were mainly concerned with simple use cases, such as the "stock quote," which were typically built using the three core Web services specifications: SOAP,1 Web Services Description Language (WSDL),2 and universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI; www.uddi.org).

I am now officially old enough to witness technology recycle itself. The first two years of my career were spent as a business analyst for an EDI standards committee for the railroad industry. The railroads never got enough participation from each other and progress was slow. However, exchanging EDI messages to track a customer shipment would have added business value. Rather than a customer having to phone every railway to track his shipment, he could receive EDI messages informing him of his shipment’s location throughout the trip plan.

OASIS Thursday said it has put the finishing touches on the ebXML Messaging Service Specification version 2.0 as the newest addition to the Boston-based e-business standard group's family.

Think of ebXML as an initiative with broad shoulders – broad shoulders to balance big business problems. B2B e-commerce itself is broad in scope, and while many XML initiatives are primarily technical excursions with specific scientific objectives, ebXML has sought practical business relevance right from the start by coordinating the best existing standards to address real-world business problems.

This article provides a high-level overview of ebXML (electronic business XML), a new standard for doing business electronically. It describes the rationale for ebXML, lists some scenarios where ebXML can be used, and provides a brief tour of the technical architecture.

A collection of standardized message structures and vocabularies for conducting automatic business-to-business transactions using the Internet or e-mail. The acronym stands for electronic business using eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

To continue our ebXML series at developer.com, I had the chance to interview David Webber, a co-chair of the ebXML Joint Marketing Team. The interview was conducted via email. David is well known in the XML community for his long involvement with e-commerce. I originally met David as early as 1997 (!) in the XML/EDI Group. Most recently David was VP Business Development for XML Global. He has just released his newest baby, VisualScriptXML.

After more than two years of tugs and tweaks, the OASIS interoperability standards consortium last week ratified the ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement as an OASIS open standard. ebXML CPPA Version 2.0 defines the technical rights of business partners and provides a record of agreements between partners, enabling organizations to conduct secure business-to-business transactions.

Bringing the pending technology closer to a final specification, ebXML (e-business XML) standards bodies kicked off a week's worth of meetings and working groups here Monday.

Every day we hear of businesses announcing partnerships with each other in order to provide more dynamic applications. As the number of these applications increase, electronic businesses are faced with the fundamental problems of making sure that their applications are not only dynamic but maintain a high degree of inter-operability between their applications and the businesses with which they collaborate.

This series, for the most part, has focused primarily on ebXML deficiencies and on the past. I will close this series by making a few observations on ebXML accomplishments then turn to the future.

OASIS this week ratified a new version of the ebXML-based standard used to define e-business partners' technical capabilities and agreements, according to officials at the Boston-based standards organization.

This is the fourth article in the ebXML series here at developer.com. The first 2 articles introduced the organizations and history behind ebXML. The last article introduced a typical ebXML transaction.

Whereas EDI for years has provided a usable but expensive way for companies to exchange information in an automated manner, ebXML now provides a means for companies to integrate their processes much more easily. Based on XML, it provides a methodology for business to determine what information they should exchange and how, as well as a set of specifications to allow automation of the process. This tutorial gives an overview of ebXML, explaining how all of the pieces fit together.

The ebXML BP technology, which is royalty-free, will support the exchange of standards-based process definitions, such as those developed by industry-specific organizations. It is part of a suite of specifications enabling conducting of business over the Internet.

The OASIS interoperability group Monday has finally ratified the ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement (CPPA) v2.0 as an OASIS Open Standard, making the protocol law in the consortium.