The world of business is old and has a significant impact on our lives in the western world. New theories have been introduced and new ways of doing business have evolved. With the beginning of the computer era business has quickly adopted the usage of new technologies to advance. Today companies and organisations are heavily supported by software systems to conduct business. Early software systems were mostly internal company focused solutions and did not encourage enough inter-enterprise collaborations. The exchange of business documents between enterprises became the focus and standards like EDI (Electronic Document Interchange) 2 emerged. ebXML can be viewed as the next generation of EDI. ebXML provides a framework for a global electronic marketplace.
ebXML is a joint initiative by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT)3 and the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)4. This initiative specified ebXML and provides the ebXML specifications per May 2001, for download at http://www.ebXML.org. Leading software companies have started to implement the ebXML specifications for their software packages.
However there is a current gap of interest in the computer science academic world in what the current real world business activities and specifications of ebXML are.
The objective of this report is to give background information on electronic business in general and to introduce the ebXML specifications. In particular the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema and the ebXML Messaging Service are shown.
Once the ebXML specifications are understood some ebXML related academic research can be done in order to solve some of the ebXML specific problems.