Denmark On Board With OASIS's UBL

01/28/2004

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The Danish National XML Committee has formally adopted an early version of the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) as a standard for e-Commerce in the public sector. Following a 30-day public hearing, the Danish XML Committee decided to use UBL 0.7 to enable integration between systems controlled by state authorities and a newly implemented portal for public procurement.

UBL provides an XML library of common business data components together with a set of standard business documents such as purchase orders and invoices that are assembled from the component library. UBL is the product of an international technical committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a non-profit consortium dedicated to the creation of XML standards. Currently at version 1.0 Beta, UBL is produced in an open, publicly visible process and is made available without royalties or other fees.

The Public Procurement Portal - www.doip.dk - is an electronic market place to which both private and public purchasers and their suppliers have access, and whose functionality, interface, security and transaction costs are regulated by the public sector. It is the first public procurement portal in Europe. The establishment of the Public Procurement Portal is an important part of the strategy to make procurement efficient and is implemented on the basis of the wish to create a common infrastructure for the trade between the public units and the suppliers.

With a public sector procurement of goods and services for approximately DKK 100 billion per year, even modest improvements in efficiency will be of great value for Danish society. By virtue of the public sector's purchasing volume, increased use of e-commerce will furthermore contribute to the penetration of e-commerce in Denmark in general. The suppliers will get accustomed to e-commerce and an infrastructure will be established. Particularly favourable arrangements have been made to secure access by small suppliers.

"A royalty free standard with strong and broad vendor support is a key enabler for the development of both e-Business and e-Government. We are pleased to be a part of the OASIS UBL initiative," said Michael Bang Kjeldgaard of the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency, chair of the Danish XML Committee. "We have learned valuable lessons from the work being carried out in the OASIS UBL Technical Committee. Not only does UBL deliver a royalty free standard for electronic commerce, but the 'Naming and Design Rules,' that dictate how UBL is expressed in XML Schema, have inspired us in the development of other XML vocabularies."

"The availability of UBL has greatly reduced the costs associated with developing an XML-interface between State institutions and our procurement gateway," says Soren Bauer of the Agency for Governmental Management. "The OASIS UBL Technical Committee has been very responsive to our proposals for enhancement, and we are excited to be among the first to implement UBL. The UBL initiative is a major breakthrough and provides a huge potential for future integration efforts. We congratulate OASIS on a job well done."

Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems, chair of the OASIS UBL Technical Committee and organizer of the working group that created XML agrees: "In adopting UBL, Denmark takes the lead in establishing an open, non-proprietary e-commerce environment equally suitable for both governments and small businesses. UBL's vendor-neutral development process and free licensing makes it a natural choice for government procurement, and I believe that this announcement will jump start UBL adoption by governments across Europe."

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