Link - Universal Business Language ( UBL )
OASIS Universal Business Language standard. Not a far reaching standard, but probably more useful for small, resource-starved development projects.
From the standards document:
... The OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) is intended to help solve these problems by defining a generic XML interchange format for business documents that can be extended to meet the requirements of particular industries. Specifically, UBL 1.0 provides the following:
- A library of XML schemas for reusable data components such as “Address,” “Item,” and “Payment” — the common data elements of everyday business documents.
- A small set of XML schemas for common business documents such as “Order,” “Despatch Advice,” and “Invoice” that are constructed from the UBL library components and can be used in a generic order-to-invoice trading context.
- Support for the customization of UBL in specific trading relationships.
... UBL is designed to provide a universally understood and recognized commercial syntax for legally binding business documents and to operate within a standard business framework such as ISO 15000 (ebXML) to provide a complete, standards-based infrastructure that can extend the benefits of existing EDI systems to businesses of all sizes.