This is the official community gathering place and information resource for the OASIS UBL (ISO/IEC 19845) International Standard. UBL defines a royalty-free library of standard electronic XML business documents such as purchase orders and invoices.
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January 2011 update: This free library has been updated with new invocation features for formatting and with the embedding of the input UBL XML inside of the output PDF in XMP metadata. Free tools from Crane's web site can be used to extract the UBL out of the PDF.
December 2008:
Crane Softwrights Ltd.'s free library to print a UBL 2.0 Invoice to PDF and HTML now supports box labels in 14 languages: Bosnian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovak and Spanish.
A pilot project has been launched to setup an e-Invoicing and e-Ordering system between the European Commission and a number of suppliers.
The IDABC e-Invoicing and e-Ordering project started in the summer of 2007 as a joint initiative from the Commission's DG MARKT and DIGIT. The overall project objective is to contribute to the use of electronic invoicing in the public sector in line with the objectives of the i2010 e-Government action plan and the e-Procurement action plan.
The OASIS UBL German Localization Subcommittee (DELSC) has been formed. The DELSC joins already existing Chinese, Danish, Italian,Japanese, Korean, and Spanish UBL Localization Subcommittees at OASIS. Qualified German-speaking business experts interested in creating the German version of the UBL Data Dictionary should contact the chair, Karsten Tolle.
Crane Softwrights Ltd. offers Universal Business Language (UBL) training and consulting to clients worldwide.
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is implementing technology from Fundtech-subsidiary Accountis to provide bank-branded electronic invoicing services to its corporate customers. The Accountis platform uses UBL standards for its documents. RBS has signed a multi-year contract for Accountis's electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP) technology which it will use to provide VAT-compliant e-invoicing services to corporate customers in the UK.
The eProcurement Forum, the DG Internal Market and Services and IDABC e-Invoicing and e-Ordering project of the European Commission and the CEN Workshop on Business Interoperability Interfaces for Public Procurement are inviting European organizations to complete their eProcurement online questionnaire.
The Swedish National Financial Management Authority has published a press release regarding status for e-invoicing in Swedish government. Sweden's Svefaktura is a profile of UBL.
Most important is that 205 out of 221 agencies can send and receive e-invoices today. Workplans are in place for adopting new routines, connecting suppliers and preparing for the entire be-procurement business process.
The Electronic Freight Management (EFM) initiative is a US Department of Transport sponsored project that applies Web technologies that improve data and message transmissions between supply chain partners.
EFM uses UBL documents and a federated set of web services to create an exciting new platform for tracking freight through a supply chain.
The CEFM (Columbus EFM) project is a test recently concluded using an existing supply chain. For details see the web site below.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced a new release of the XML Schema Quality of Design Tool (QOD) from the Manufacturing Engineering Lab. "QOD assists in consistently using XML Schema for the specification of information. QOD is intended for both people developing guidelines for writing high quality XML schemas and those writing XML schemas. The purpose of QOD is to improve the quality of the XML schemas. The system allows users to define rules for writing quality XML Schemas and to test schemas against those rules.
