UBL 2.3 adoption
The ESPD-EDM 3.0.0 has upgraded the UBL version to 2.3 pursuant to the alignment with eForms, which also implements this UBL version.
UBL, developed by the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is a royalty-free library of standard electronic Extensible Markup Language (XML) business documents. It is designed to plug directly into existing business, legal, auditing, and records management practices, and to operate within a standard business framework such as ISO 15000 (ebXML) to provide a complete, standards-based infrastructure that can extend the benefits of existing Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems to businesses of all sizes.
UBL is also included in the ICT Standards for Procurement: the rules on European standardisation allow the European Commission to identify information and communication technology (ICT) technical specifications - that are not national, European or international standards - to be eligible for referencing in public procurement.
UBL is a specific used in some Member States and by the EU institutions, namely the European Commision. UBL is also referred to in the Commission implementing decision of 31 October 2014 on the identification of Universal Business Language version 2.1 for referencing in public procurement COM Decision 2014/771/EU.
Technical resources and tools are freely available for its use and re purpose by the Member States, Service Providers, EC and any other stakeholders. Especially interesting and largely used are the open source tools and artefacts referred by the OASIS UBL-TC, such as Genericode , ISO Schematron and Crane Softwright.
All the semantic assets needed to implement ESPD electronic documents are organised in a distribution package. The content of this folder is organised as follows:
- cl: reference data (codelists) used by the XML instances. It also contains a spread-sheet with all the ESPD criteria structured. This spread-sheet can be used to automatically generate ESPD XML instances.
- doc: contains this document (and other documents to support developers);
- mod: UBL-2.3 model specified in spread-sheets;
- val: validation artefacts (eg. ISO Schematron and OASIS Genericode CVA files);
- xml: samples of ESPD XML instances for illustrative and testing purposes;
- xsd: the UBL-2.3 XSD Schemas, documented (annotated) version;
- xsdrt: the UBL-2.3 XSD Schemas, runtime version;
- xslt: transformation stylesheets used to generate basic sample XML instances from the criteria defined in spreadsheets ESPD data structures (see folder dist/cl).