[ubl-comment] Fwd: NACS Brings Convenience Stores to OASIS UBL Liaisons

[Jon Bosak <Jon.Bosak@sun.com>]

------- Start of forwarded message -------
Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2002 11:29:46 -0400
From: Carol Geyer <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>
Subject: [announce] NACS Brings Convenience Stores to OASIS UBL Liaisons
To: announce@lists.oasis-open.org

NACS Brings Convenience Stores to OASIS UBL Liaisons

Boston, MA, USA; 5 August 2002 -- NACS, an international trade
association representing the convenience store and petroleum
marketing industry, has become the latest industry group to
appoint a representative to the OASIS Universal Business Language
(UBL) Technical Committee. NACS joins liaisons from a broad group
of industry standards organizations in the subcommittee that
provides guidance to UBL, the initiative to define standard XML
business forms for electronic commerce.

NACS (http://www.cstorecentral.com/) is an international trade
association representing 2,300 retail and 1,700 supplier company
members. NACS member companies do business in nearly 40 countries
around the world, with the majority of members based in the United
States.  The U.S. convenience store industry, with over 124,500
stores across the country, posted $283 billion in total sales for
2001, with $171 billion in motor fuel sales.

"The typical convenience store conducts more than a thousand
customer interactions a day and must deal with a wide range of
suppliers," said John Hervey, CTO of NACS.  "Convenience stores
are not only points of sale for many perishable and packaged goods
but are also major retail outlets for gasoline and other petroleum
products.  We're looking to UBL to provide a uniform set of
standards for transactions across the whole range of convenience
store suppliers."

Other organizations with liaisons to UBL include: ACORD,
representing the insurance industry; ARTS, representing retail
sales; ASC X12 and the UN/EDIFACT Working Group, representing
U.S. and international EDI standards; EIDX, representing the
electronics industry; RosettaNet, the information technology
consortium; and XBRL, the accounting industry standards
organization.  UBL liaisons provide input to UBL and coordinate
the review of standard XML business schemas as they become
publicly available. See http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/lsc/
for details.

"Input from industry data exchange organizations ensures that UBL
reflects the needs of the marketplace," said Jon Bosak of Sun
Microsystems, chair of the OASIS UBL Technical Committee and
organizer of the working group that created XML. "Our goal of
defining a common XML library for basic business documents like
purchase orders, invoices, and shipping notices crosses all
industries. Contributing to the development of our library of UBL
schemas allows industry groups to pool their resources in the
design of common business documents and to focus their special
expertise on the development of XML schemas for the documents that
are specific to their own domain."

About UBL (http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl)

The OASIS UBL (Universal Business Language) Technical Committee
defines a common XML library for basic business documents like
purchase orders, invoices, and shipping notices.  UBL provides a
standard set of XML building blocks together with a framework that
will enable trading partners to unambiguously identify and
exchange basic e-commerce documents in specific business contexts.

The OASIS UBL effort builds on the Electronic Business XML (ebXML)
infrastructure developed by OASIS and the United Nations.  The
ebXML specifications provide for XML registry services, reliable
XML messaging, standardized trading partner agreements, a standard
data dictionary, and a business context methodology.  However, UBL
documents are usable in a wide variety of other ecommerce
frameworks as well.

UBL unites and harmonizes a number of currently existing XML and
EDI business libraries into a set of internationally recognized de
jure standards. Designed to solve major interoperability problems
for both vendors and users, UBL will speed the entry of small and
medium-size businesses into the electronic marketplace. UBL is
freely available to everyone without legal encumbrance or
licensing fees.

About OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org):

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards) is a not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the
development, convergence and adoption of e-business
standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda,
using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote
industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. OASIS produces
worldwide standards for security, Web services, XML conformance,
business transactions, electronic publishing, topic maps and
interoperability within and between marketplaces.

For more information:
Carol Geyer
Director of Communications
OASIS www.oasis-open.org
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.978.667.5115 x209