In order to facilitate business with the government and among the industry, the Danish Government deployed a national e-invoicing service, called ‘NemHandel’. It allows businesses to send standardised UBL e-invoices through the internet. Based on open and common standards, NemHandel also allows businesses to send e-invoices which were generated in their internal ERP or invoicing systems.

For several years the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and
Electronic Business (CEFACT) has been developing a set of electronic
standards for international trade data. Progress has been slower than
had been hoped for, and CEFACT is currently reassessing stakeholder
needs and priorities to ensure that its work is addressing the most
urgent requirements. The UN/CEFACT project teams responsible are
consulting those already involved in CEFACT’s work as well as a
selection of stakeholders that are not, in order to submit a report to
CEFACT by the end of February 2010.

Information about the advancements of the eBIZ-TCF project comes from the successful conclusion of the large-scale European Conference for a common eLanguage for European Textile Clothing Footwear industry promoted by the project. 

Please see this UBL-Dev announcement regarding an open public review:

  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-dev/200910/msg00018.html

These specifications are used in UBL deployments and can be used with any XML vocabulary.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken

The European Commission is now  making  it easier for companies, in particular Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), to bid for public sector contracts anywhere in EU, thus making  a crucial step towards  the Single European Market.

The Commission says the aim of the rule change is to increase the use of electronic invoicing, reduce burdens on business, support small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and to help tackle fraud.

Data interoperability remains an important problem in the industry today which is handled by the mapping experts and data consultants who understand the semantic meaning of each entity in a specific interface and define the mappings among different document artifacts, usually as XSLT rules.

In order to facilitate this costly and tedious process, the OASIS SET TC
(http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=set)
has been established.

The OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) TC has recently approved the UBL 2.0 International Data Dictionary as a Committee Draft and approved the package for public review: The public review started 7 November 2008, and ends 6 January 2008. There is an open invitation to comment and feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not,

The European Commission IDABC eInvoicing and eOrdering project team has recently reached an important milestone: the delivery of the prototype. It allows the sending of an XML invoice to the Commission's e-PRIOR system and the automatic integration in the back-office system after a number of validations. The major next step is a real-life pilot with a number of IT suppliers.

The Universal Business Language (UBL) Guidelines for Customization Version 1.0 provides practical information for creating UBL-conformant and UBL-compatible document schemas.