The Universal Business Language ecosystem and the OASIS TC process
G. Ken Holman · Balisage series on markup technologies · 2018
A rich worldwide ecosystem has grown around the freely-available Universal Business Language (UBL) standard for 81 business documents such as purchase orders, invoices, waybills, etc., and 4600 semantic business objects expressed in those business documents The UBL development committee was formed in 2001 as a technical committee in OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) under a strict set of transparency rules supported by a rich set of collaborative tools with which the committee members have created both normative and non-normative work products. For UBL, normative XML schemas and non-normative JSON schemas are examples of both of these kinds of work products, specified for user communities to leverage in their communication environments for electronic business solutions. Solutions built on a foundation of open standards are attractive to large ecosystems of developers and end users working towards shared objectives. To be truly open, the development and deployment of such a specification must address three critically important issues: governance, transparency and availability. UBL was developed under the governance of the OASIS Technical Committee Process, working with a tool set that is available to any community wanting to create a markup vocabulary. OASIS, a membership organization, fosters the successful development of work products by its members participating in its technical committees. And so it is important to look into the detail of these two perspectives of UBL: how UBL is best deployed within the ecosystem due to its magnitude, and how UBL is governed and maintained during the development process. Illustrated by UBL, when considering where to bring together participants developing new open vocabulary ecosystems, OASIS with its TC process should be a front-runner in your consideration of a positive and productive environment for building team results.