UBL 2.0 is amazingly advanced for the work of a volunteer technical committee. How did that happen?
An important and controversial early decision of the UBL TC was to base its work on an existing set of XML business schemas. Instead of starting from scratch, the UBL TC accepted the contribution by CommerceOne and SAP of an already widely deployed commercial XML business vocabulary, xCBL 3.0. The decision to begin with xCBL was based on four key considerations. First, xCBL 3.0 was a mature XML specification already used in a number of ecommerce marketplaces. Second, xCBL was based on a component library model, ensuring much better alignment among document types derived from the library than had been the case with older message standards in which the different document types were developed independently. Third, xCBL had been published under terms that allowed the free creation of derivative works. And fourth, CommerceOne and SAP were willing to back up their contribution with technical resources that supported much of UBL’s early development. UBL has since evolved independently to the
