Where did UBL come from?
The UBL initiative originated in efforts beginning in mid-1999 to create a set of standard XML “office documents” within OASIS. The work of the OASIS OfficeDoc TC under the leadership of Murray Altheim of Sun Microsystems was set aside when OASIS and UN/CEFACT began collaboration on ebXML in December 1999. Interest in the creation of a standard XML syntax for basic commercial documents revived again in May 2000 with the decision in ebXML to omit a standard XML “payload” syntax from the initial set of ebXML deliverables. The working group that came to be known as UBL began in April 2001 as a discussion group sponsored by CommerceNet and was established as an OASIS Technical Committee in November 2001.
