Welcome to the third installment in our ebXML series. ebXML is an international initiative to develop and promote a set of standards for electronic business with XML.

2003 is being touted as the year in which the various XML business process standards coalesce into something that is meaningful and of practical benefit.

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).

This is the second article in a series that discuss ebXML, a global standard for electronic business. This article reviews the main working groups within ebXML and how they relate to each other.

My column last week on the slow adoption of ebXML, the B2B e-commerce standard, resulted in so much intelligent feedback that I'm compelled to share some of it with you.

The developers of the ebXML (define) Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) are working to live up to their global billing by forming a new technical committee of the OASIS international standards consortium.

The Electronic Business XML (ebXML) project released three more technical specifications for review on 28 March, including a new draft document on messaging services. This part of ebXML -- formerly known as transport, routing, and packaging -- had made more early progress than the other technical features, but it also came under more pressure to include the work of other initiatives, specifically the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

No, not through big B2B marketplaces such as Covisint. And not through B2C sites such as Amazon. The fat pipe for e-commerce dollars remains electronic data interchange (EDI), a standard born in the 1970s that enables businesses to order and bill electronically, typically for raw materials used in manufacturing. People don't think of EDI as e-commerce because most of its connections are still proprietary rather than Internet-based. But whatever you call it, EDI continues to transfer many times the dollars conveyed by Internet-based commerce, according to most estimates.

Electronic business is an all-encompassing term. It could mean online shopping, electronic marketplaces, electronic banking or even emailing your business partners! What about marketing web site or eBay, isn't that electronic business?

While there are many standards that look like ebXML, ebXML is the first horizontal standard designed to address the exchange of information and adherence to inter-enterprise processes. However, in attempting to reach this lofty goal, ebXML is also a complex standard and takes some understanding before we can comprehend its value to the world of application integration and electronic business.

Electronic business and XML -- it seems like an old pairing. However, OASIS and the United Nations are pushing the limits of both technologies, providing a set of specifications that would move world trade and the global economy into the technological age. Brett McLaughlin talks with Bill Smith, the president of OASIS, about the ebXML project and its possible impact on companies around the globe.

ebXML is a big project with a lot of pieces. In this article David Mertz outlines how the pieces all fit together. This overview provides an introduction to the ebXML concept and then looks a bit more specifically at the representation of business processes, an important starting point for ebXML implementations. Two short bits of sample code demonstrate the ProcessSpecification DTD and a package of collaborations.