In what ways does UBL support an incremental transition from paper-based trade to electronic trade?
UBL is a strongly document-centric approach to electronic commerce that focuses on standardizing business data in a way that maps easily to traditional printed forms. The primary international standard for the printed forms of traditional documents is the UN Layout Key, which for more than 40 years has served as the model for documents used in international trade. A mapping of all the UBL documents to their equivalent UN Layout Keys is provided as part of the UBL 1.0 release. Free UBL 1.0 XSL-FO stylesheets and an XSL-FO stylesheet processor are available from Crane Softwrights (http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/links/res-ublo.htm) to convert UBL 1.0 documents to their Layout Key equivalents in HTML and PDF form, and free Java software based on the Crane library is available from Ambrosoft (http://ambrosoft.com/) to directly transform any UBL document into HTML files conformant to the UN Layout Key. Work is underway to create stylesheet support for the subset of UBL 2.0 documents that ha
