An announcement from CommerceNet and the UN/CEFACT eBusiness Transition Working Group (eBTWG) describes the first meeting of the working group in San Francisco on October 8-12, 2001. During its initial five-day meeting, "eBTWG will continue UN/CEFACT and OASIS' efforts to further the development of XML standards for electronic business. The working group's first order of business is to pinpoint the specific work necessary to advance ebXML development as related to Business Processes, Core Components and eBusiness Architecture. For the opening meeting, eBTWG has identified three working project teams. In the coming weeks, more project teams will be added to the October agenda. The first three project teams will focus on core areas of ebXML development. The project teams include: (1) The Core Components Specifications Project Team, which is charged with producing a consolidated ebXML Core Components Technical Specification that incorporates the material in the ebXML Discovery and Analysis, Naming Convention and Context technical reports. (2) The Business Collaboration Patterns and Monitored Commitments Specification, which will be responsible for defining and showing through example, what businesses can reasonably expect and what the underlying technology must support within a fully compliant ebXML business relationship. (3) The eBusiness Architecture Specification, which will ensure that electronic business initiatives are technically and practically implementable and that the eBusiness architecture meets the requirements of businesses on a global scale." The eBTWG Executives have also announced the approval of an XML Business Document Library (XBDL) Project which "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."

The eBTWG Core Components Specifications Project Team "is to produce: (1) A consolidated ebXML Core Components Technical Specification that incorporates the material in the ebXML Discovery and Analysis, Naming Convention, and Context technical reports [and] adds material related to Metadata Definition (2) Specification for and the beginning lexicon of core components. The Core Components Specifications Project Team consists of experts with broad knowledge in the area of electronic business (ebXML, UN/EDIFACT, and national EDI/eBusiness), ebXML core components, and technical specification development."

"The eBusiness Transition Ad-Hoc Working was created by UN/CEFACT Steering Group in July 2001 for the purpose of continuing the UN/CEFACT's role in pioneering the development of XML standards for electronic business. The group was formed to build on the success of the earlier ebXML Joint Initiative between UN/CEFACT and OASIS."

On September 21, 2001 the eBTWG Executives announced the XML Business Document Library (XBDL) Project which "is in concept identical to the recently approved work of the OASIS UBL Technical Committee." The eBTWG FAQ document provides some provisional explanation of the relationship between eBTWG activities and those undertaken by UBL and the EWG/X12 Joint Core Components Initiative.