Abstract. 

The leading effort for creating a standard semantic basis for business documents to solve electronic business document interoperability problem came from the UN/CEFACT (United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business) Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) through a document modeling methodology. Currently, the main challenge in using UN/CEFACT CCTS based approaches is that the document artifacts are stored in spreadsheets and this makes it very difficult to discover the previously defined components and to check their consistency. Furthermore, businesses need to customize standard documents according to their specific needs. The first XML implementation of UN/CEFACT CCTS, namely, Universal Business Language (UBL) provides detailed text-based descriptions of customization mechanisms. However without automated tool support, it is difficult to apply the customization and to maintain the consistency of the customizations.  iSURF eDoCreator tool addresses these problems by providing an online common UN/CEFACT CCTS based document component modeling repository which integrates the machine processable version of paper-based UBL customization guidelines. In this way, iSURF eDoCreator environment aims to maximize re-use of available document building blocks and minimize the tedious document design and customization efforts. The environment also proved to be very useful in performing the gap analysis between different customizations of UBL.

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