UBL approved as OASIS draft

The Universal Business Language (UBL) 1.0 has been approved as an OASIS committee draft.

Available for free with no licensing fees, UBM defines a generic, modular XML interchange format for business documents that can be extended to particular industry needs. This version of the specification represents six years of development and incorporates more than a year of public review.

"The final result is now ready for implementation in commercial and open-source software efforts," OASIS said in a statement.

UBL Version 1.0 Committee Draft was now being submitted to OASIS for public review before proceeding to further standardization procedures.

The UBL v1.0 release delivered a library of XML schemas for reusable data components, a small set of XML schemas for common business documents useful in a generic order-to-invoice trading context, and support for the customisation of UBL in specific trading relationships. The UBL schemas are modular, reusable, and extensible in XML-aware ways.

The UBL v1.0 Committee Draft release was currently being distributed for public review as a ZIP archive containing prose documentation, normative XML Schemas, UML diagrams, spreadsheet models, formatting specifications, sample instances, and other components.