Following almost one and a half decades of effort by the OASIS Technical Committee, the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) V2.1 was approved as an International Standard: Universal Business Language (UBL) v2.1 (ISO/IEC 19845) on Friday 18 December 2015.

UBL, the Universal Business Language, is the product of an international effort to define a royalty-free library of standard electronic XML business documents such as purchase orders and invoices and was developed by an OASIS Technical Committee with participation from a variety of industry data standards organizations.

The UBL originated out of efforts in 1999 to create a set of standard XML "office documents" within OASIS.  The working group that came to be known as UBL was established as an in November 2001.  This approval of the Universal Business Language (UBL) v2.1 (ISO/IEC 19845) ensures that UBL is both recognized in public sector policies and will also provide additional layers of governance for the long-term sustainability of UBL.  Sparx Systems has been a long term supporter of the work of the OASIS Technical Committee responsible for this development and has demonstrated this relationship with provision of Enterprise Architect licences for the standard development effort.

Sparx Systems support for standards was extended with the addition of the Schema Composer in the release of, Enterprise Architect 12 earlier this year.  Following expressions of concern about the lack of semantic interoperability between various standards communities and the impact that this was having on the adoption of standards by the stakeholders in various industry ecosystems, Sparx Systems created the Schema Composer which enables semantic interoperability, by automating the building of XSD and similar data definitions from a model subset, using simple check boxes. 

Direct Support for Key Industry Standards

The Schema Composer currently targets a number of key industry standards including CIM, NIEM, UN/CEFACT, UBL and generic XSD, RDF, OWL and other formats and allows the rapid design and build of  XSD and similar data definitions such as RDF and JSON, from a selection of elements within the model. 

NIEM

NIEM schema definition and model transform (for creating NIEM model extensions and schemas) is directly supported in Schema Composer and a NIEM subset can be created directly within your model ready to define extension and exchange schemas.

CIM

Similarly CIM XSD schemas are directly supported in the Schema Composer as is CIM Augmented RDFS which includes both forward and inverse property for each bi-directional Association in the message. See http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/products/ea/12/index.html

Enterprise Architect provides the following resources for the composition of business documents using UBL:

UML Framework
         -  UBL 2.1 Main Document Libraries
         -  UBL 2.1 Common Component Libraries

Business Document Composition
         -  Schema Composer for component composition
         -  Schema Composer for document composition
         -  Schema Composer for schema generation
         -  Add-in integration
         -  Scripting integration

For more information, please visit the Enterprise Architect User Guide.

"OASIS", ["UBL" and "Universal Business Language" ] are trademarks of OASIS, the open standards consortium where the [UBL] specification is owned and developed. [UBL] is a copyrighted © work of OASIS Open. All rights reserved.