UBL International 2006 - http://www.ublconference.com

Symposium programme - Thursday November 16, 2006

UBL Introduction
G. Ken Holman, Canada

A brief introduction to the Universal Business Language, its objectives, its approach, and the use of technologies to meet international business document interchange requirements.

From 15 to 100 million UBL messages: Status and future infrastructure
Mikkel Hippe Brun and Helle Schade-Sørensen, Denmark

The private sector in Denmark is currently exchanging 1,25 million electronic invoices every month based on UBL. Extensive national localization has now resulted in a number of national profiles of UBL 2.0. A new Service Oriented Infrastructure will furthermore be established to support reliable, secure and asynchronous exchange of business messages. Most ERP-vendors are expected to support the infrastructure and UBL 2.0 by mid 2007.

NES Introduction
Kerstin Wiss Holmdahl, Sweden

As part of the Northern European cooperation on e-commerce and eprocurement, representatives from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, UK and Iceland is working to develop a Northern European Subset (NES) of UBL 2.0 documents. The NES group is also very active within the collaboration work between UBL and UNCEFACT.

The presentation will show the cooperation in NES in order to make interoperability and crossborder invoices possible between the countries, the results and plans. The presentation also includes the implementation of UBL in Sweden. The Svefaktura (Swede-invoice) is based on UBL 1.0.

UBL and UN/CEFACT - adding sanction to traction
Tim McGrath, Australia

Building on the UN/CEFACT and OASIS Cooperation Agreement, UN/CEFACT announced a collaboration plan with OASIS and the UBL TC at their June 2006 Plenary.  The objective of this collaboration is for UBL to work within the UN/CEFACT Forum groups to build a common set of electronic business document standards.  The plan specifies these deliverables as the future upgrade path for UBL whilst allowing the maintenance of UBL 2 to remain within the existing OASIS UBL TC.

In doing so it is intended that UBL will gain the sanction desired by the market without losing the momentum of adoption (the traction) that UBL has already achieved.

This presentation will present the various activities involved in this collaboration plan and some of the issues and opportunities that have been identified.

E-invoicing in Spain
Arturo Gonzalez MacDowell, Spain

A report on the recent legal and market developments in Europe and Spain regarding e-invoice (electronic invoices) and alternative e-invoice standards in Spain (GS1, CCI, UBL). Steps in the adoption of UBL for e-Procurement and e-Government, and the banks' role in e-invoice adoption. Also covered will be electronic signatures as an e-invoice requirement in e-invoice systems and platforms.

EU-Project ABILITIES Application BUS for Interoperability among SMEs in New EU Member States
Karsten Tolle, Germany

The presentation will introduce to our EU-Project called ABILITIES (Application Bus for InteroperabiLITy In enlarged Europe SMEs). The project started in January 2006 and is scheduled for two years. The basic goal of ABILITIES is to study, design and develop a federated architecture implemented by a set of UBL 2.0 messages and basic interoperability services, which aims at supporting SMEs EAI in e-commerce contexts, specifically in less developed countries and less Research and Technology Development intensive industrial sectors. The main target groups are very small enterprises normally not having the knowledge, manpower and systems to adopt new standards like UBL on their own.

The presentation will give an overview of the solutions we are planning to enable an easy EAI between these small enterprises without overwhelming them by complex collaboration agreements needed upfront. In addition ABILITIES emphases on features supporting human interactions needed for complex custom product orders, e.g. photo or video attachments explaining the needs of the customer or the offered product of the supplier.

Finally the presentation will point out our experience with adopting UBL 2.0 for our purposes. This includes the localization issues of UBL for the five countries and domains we have as test beds (see below).

The different industries involved into the ABILITIES project as test beds are:

• Collaborative business in Retail in Lithuania

• Business Process Integration in High-Tech Incubator in Slovakia

• Mobile Business support in agro-food industry in Turkey

• XML Documents exchange in wood industry in Romania

• Semantic Content Reconciliation in the tourism sector in Hungary

Semantic interoperability
Øvind Aassve, Norway

The presentation addresses basically the concepts of semantic interoperability what we mean by semantics, relation to other types of interoperability, how it can be realized, different levels of formalization of semantics, the cost of no semantic interoperability, the issues xml and interoperability, the increasing importance of data and an overview of the different possible semantic technologies that can be applied to the issue today. The presentation includes a presentation of the main concepts of the Core Component approach from UN/CEFACT which is the basis for UBL.

UBL and ebXML
Sacha Schlegel, Liechtenstein

This presentation illustrates how UBL business documents are used in the complete Business to Business electronic commerce framework called electronic business XML (ebXML). This presentation describes ebXML Business Process (ebBP) to model collaborative business processes. These collaborations choreograph individual business transactions which themselves reference the business documents, such as UBL business documents. The presentation then further describes how ebXML Collaboration Protocol Agreements (CPA's) are used to add technical relevant information of any electronic B2B execution. Finally, ebXML messaging is outlined which is used to exchange the UBL business documents in secure and reliable way over the public Internet.

Practical use of UBL in Northern Europe (NES)
Jostein Frømyr, Norway
Project coordinator of NES

This breakout session will provide a detailed presentation of the approach taken to secure practical implementation of UBL within NES; the Northern European Subset of UBL 2.0 developed by representatives from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, UK and Iceland. The presentations will supplement the morning presentation by providing further details on the approaches taken to secure interoperability in cross border eProcurement by introducing the concept of a profile; a document describing one or more related business processes supported by the exchange of a defined set of electronic business documents in order to fulfill a defined business purpose. There will also be presentations on the recommended solutions for electronic catalogue processes, standalone ordering and invoicing processes, as well as integrated eprocurement processes.

Conference host and co-organizer: Danish National IT- and Telecom Agency

Conference co-organizer: Crane Softwrights Ltd. (Canada) in partnership with Infomenta (Denmark)