A complete infrastructure
The ebXML initiative included five major work areas, three of which are clearly infrastructure components that facilitate registration of a business entity, discovery of business partners, configuration of business partners and exchange of business information.
The registry/repository component supports all of the above functions, making it a major piece of the infrastructure. The ebXML registry provides a set of distributed services that enable the sharing of information. This allows business process integration between business parties. The registry provides the access services interfacing, the information model and reference system implementation, while a repository provides the physical back-end information storage. For example, an ebXML registry may provide configuration information for a particular business entity from the repository in response to a query, or an ebXML repository may contain document type definitions or schemas that are retrieved by a registry query.
Collaborative Protocol Profiles are another key element of the infrastructure. The CPP specification is based on the Trading Partner Agreement Markup Language (tpaML) work begun by IBM. The IBM work was enhanced through efforts of the Trading Partner Agreement project team to produce a method for defining the transport, messaging and security environment of a specific business entity. Also, the team defined methods for dynamically exchanging the CPP data between business entities and negotiating message-exchange agreements between the parties. These profiles may be maintained by the individual business entities within the ebXML business domain or stored with an ebXML repository.
Information packaging and transport mechanisms, specified in the ebXML Message Serving Specification, are the final critical components of the ebXML infrastructure. A communications protocol-neutral method for exchanging the electronic business messages is defined in this specification. Enveloping constructs are specified that support reliable, secure delivery of business information. These flexible-enveloping techniques permit ebXML-compliant messages to contain payloads of any format type. This versatility ensures that legacy electronic business systems using traditional syntaxes (i.e., United Nations Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport; Accredited Standards Committee X12; or Health Level 7) can leverage the advantages of the ebXML infrastructure along with users of emerging technologies.
Maintenance and future development
The joint initiative is now complete. The participants have fulfilled their commitments, specifications have been published, demonstrations are going back into the box and press releases have been published. So, what happens next?
During the final plenary session on May 11, the UN group--UN/CEFACT--and OASIS signed a new memorandum of agreement for continuing the ebXML work. The agreement assigned the infrastructure component to OASIS--transport, registry/repositor and collaborative profile protocol--and placed the business components--business process and core components--within UN/CEFACT. The proposed technical committee for the transport group has scheduled its initial meeting for July; others, no doubt, also are being planned around the same time.
With the die now cast, companies can anticipate announcements from the two sponsoring organisations related to the continued improvement of this open, global, XML-based electronic business standard.
