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eBTWG Project Proposal

XML Business Document Library (XBDL)

1st DRAFT

September 2001


Table of Contents

1. Objectives
1.1 Purpose
1.2 Scope
2. Deliverables
3. Functional Expertise of Membership
4. Geographical Focus
5. Initial Contributions
Statement of resource requirements

1. Objectives

1.1 Purpose

The purpose of the project is to provide a migration path for established legacy EDI semantics and associated business process artifact dictionaries containing codes, elements and message semantics to a Standard Library of XML business grammatical components. These XML business artifacts and document structures will allow trading partners to unambiguously identify the business content to be exchanged in a specific business context. These business artifacts and content will also fully utilize all aspects of ebXML based interchanges. For SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) partners this will provide "jump start kits" for basic adoption of ebXML based transactions and interactions. A further goal will be to provide a model to facilitate interoperability between XML based vocabularies where these are already aligned on an existing EDI base.

1.2 Scope

Electronic Business artifacts from existing UN/EDIFACT semantic dictionaries, including existing harmonization and simplification efforts, such as Simpl-edi and Simpl-eb. To harmonize as far as practical with the Core Component work from Phase 1 of ebXML, including the work of the Joint Core Components initiative, and with the work of other standards or industry efforts in this area.

2. Deliverables

The project deliverables are:

  • Standard Library of XML business grammatical components, including nouns, verbs and context rules for business document structures and their associated content semantics.

  • Rules for the generation of context-specific schemas for basic business documents and their components through the application of transformation and assembly rules from a common XML source library stored in an ebXML Registry system.

3. Functional Expertise of Membership

The XML Business Document Library project team is a group of experts with broad knowledge in the area of Electronic Business (ebXML, UN/EDIFACT, and national EDI/eBusiness), ebXML Core Components, semantic and context related development.

Each UN/CEFACT head of delegation may designate one or more experts to the project team. In doing so, they may delegate this task to one or more organizations, which may be national, regional or international. Experts are expected to contribute to the work based solely on their expertise.

4. Geographical Focus

The focus is global.

5. Initial Contributions

The following contributions are submitted as part of this proposal. It is understood that these are only for consideration by the project team and that other participants may submit their own contributions in order to ensure the gathering of as much information as possible from those with expertise and a material interest in the project but at the same time allow diverse voices to comment on the details of the projects and ensures that no single organization can dominate the process:

  • UN/CEFACT's "Simpl-edi/eb" documents.

  • UN/CEFACT's Simpl-edi ad-hoc Working Group output documents.

  • UN/CEFACT's Alignment Dictionary output documents.

  • ebXML's Core Component Example Library.

NOTE: The submittors of this proposal encourage all standards or industry efforts that have performed work in this area to submit their specifications to this project as a initial contribution. This will ensure that this project team will create the single global solution enabling interoperability amongst all users that want to use simple XML documents for business information exchange as a bridge between EDI and ebXML.

Statement of resource requirements

Participants in the project shall provide resources for their own participation. The existence and functioning of the project shall not require any additional resources from the UN/ECE secretariat.