ebXML

Provides the architecture for a universal XML based business communication. UBL will provide the individual documents. xCBL is another smaller libary of business documents.

Core Components

Core components is a semantic element used for building the semantic structure of a business document.

For example, the semantic structure of a purchase order will have semantic elements such as item, quantity, price and so on. A core component represents a single piece of business information, for example Tax.Amount .

A core component when used in a business context is called a business information entity - BIE.

[Definition] Core Component (CC) - A building block for the creation of a semantically correct and meaningful information exchange package. It contains only the information pieces necessary to describe a specific concept.

"And then there's ebXML, which shares the Web Services ideal of global interoperability for business communications, but accomplishes it in a different way. EbXML, really an entire framework for global E-business, has been designed largely to move companies from EDI into the XML world. EDI is the 25-year old standard for global commerce that's used by a relatively small number of large vendors. EDI was also intended to simplify business-to-business communication, but has never been able to surmount barriers such as cost, complexity of implementation, and inadequate tools.

The problem here is that ebXML overlaps quite a bit with Web Services functionality. EbXML has its own registry and other infrastructure components that parallel Web Services, but are different. The only bright spot in the ebXML evolution, which will culminate when the ebXML 1.0 specification is released in May, is that the ebXML standards organization has agreed to support a version of SOAP, the Web Services messaging protocol. (Actually, a World Wide Web Consortium draft specification called "SOAP with attachments," which adds the capability of attaching binary, non-XML documents to a SOAP message, was needed to replace the messaging transport in ebXML). This will allow basic interoperability between Web Services and ebXML, should both of them become successful, but doesn't resolve the fact that they're trying to achieve similar goals in different ways."

From http://www.informationweek.com/author/internet.htm

References

Gibb and Damadaran "ebXML - concepts and Application" (2003)