3 ebXML

ebXML (electronic business eXtensible Mark-up Language) is a joint initiative by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The ebXML initiative provides the specifications for doing electronic business based on XML technology. The specifications of the initiative reached version 1.0 in May 2001 after 18 months of work. All documents (specifications, reports and white papers) can be downloaded from the web site of ebXML at http://www.ebxml.org. Further there are active mailing lists and archives of those mailing lists available at their site.

This section starts with an ebXML example. A short introduction to ebXML including a general example follows. Further the main parts of ebXML are mentioned. The main parts of ebXML are the Registry/Repository, Business Processes, Collaboration Protocol Profile and Collaboration Protocol Agreement, Core Components and Messaging.