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.

The Open ebXML Project have released tools supporting document generation for ebXML Business Process Analysis worksheets, and Finetix have released an open source tool for processing FpML, the financial products markup language.

The United Nations CEFACT and OASIS today announced that the core technical infrastructure of ebXML, the Electronic Business XML Initiative, nears completion and will be delivered in March 2001, two months ahead of schedule. The technical specifications for the transport, routing and packaging (TRP), trading partner agreements (TPA), and registry/repository (REG/REP) components of ebXML provide the required pieces to ensure interoperability based on XML standards for global business on the Internet.

The Webswell company launched new release of its open source ebXML integration framework Webswell Connect, version 1.1 Beta.

The ebXML language (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language) is a business protocol that enables enterprises to conduct business over the Internet. WebLogic Workshop uses ebXML controls for initiator processes and ebXML Participant Business Processes templates for participant processes to build business processes systems which exchange ebXML business messages between trading partners.

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.

A collection of ebXML FAQs.

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.

UN/CEFACT and OASIS have formally announced that they are to integrate the SOAP 1.1 and SOAP with Attachments specifications into the ebXML Messaging Specification.

This topic provides an introduction to implementing ebXML solutions with WebLogic Integration. It contains the following sections:

This section describes how you design and manage ebXML business processes using workflows, and it provides the steps you must take to start the exchange of ebXML business messages between trading partners. It includes the following topics:

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).

The Center for E-commerce Infrastructure Development (CECID) of HKU's Department of Computer Science and Information Systems is supporting three pilot projects to demonstrate the feasibility and added values of ebXML applications. MTR Corporation (the subway operator of Hong Kong) and Saggio (Asia Pacific) Company (a leading office supplies vendor in Asia) are piloting the use of ebXML for the exchange of purchasing documents in automating transaction processing in office supplies procurement.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the basis of the "next big thing" - a way to connect millions of pockets of information via the Internet so that the next generation of Internet software applications can seamlessly work together.

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.

ebXML began in the fall of 1999 as effort by UN/CEFACT and OASIS to initiate a worldwide project to enable the consistent use of XML for the exchange of all electronic business data.

The ebXML Requirements Specification was approved at the May 2000 ebXML Work Group Meeting. Our current work plan is to produce an updated version to be approved at the May meeting. The updates include primarily include new requirements, such as the trading partner related requirements, identified since version 1.0 was approved. It includes further detail, clarification, or corrections so that the requirements and other delivered specifications form a consistent whole.

ebXML is a set of specifications that together enable a modular electronic business framework. The vision of ebXML is to enable a global electronic marketplace where enterprises of any size and in any geographical location can meet and conduct business with each other through the exchange of XML based messages. ebXML is a joint initiative of the United Nations (UN/CEFACT) and OASIS, developed with global participation for global usage.

ebXML (electronic business eXtensible Mark-up Language) is a joint initiative by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The ebXML initiative provides the specifications for doing electronic business based on XML technology. The specifications of the initiative reached version 1.0 in May 2001 after 18 months of work. All documents (specifications, reports and white papers) can be downloaded from the web site of ebXML at http://www.ebxml.org. Further there are active mailing lists and archives of those mailing lists available at their site.