UBL 1.0 Beta Committee Draft approved

[jon.bosak@sun.com]

UBL members and observers,

I am pleased to report that UBL 1.0 Beta has been approved as an
OASIS Committee Draft by the OASIS Universal Business Language
Technical Committee and is now available for public implementation
testing. A formal announcement of this event can be expected after
the OASIS staff returns from the Thanksgiving holiday next week.

OASIS Committee Drafts require the affirmative vote of 2/3 of the
voting members of the technical committee responsible for the
draft with no more than 1/4 voting to disapprove. In the final
vote on UBL 1.0 Beta, the draft received votes to approve from 91
percent of the voting members of the UBL TC and votes to
disapprove from none of them.

The UBL 1.0 Beta package is temporarily located at

   http://ubl.cim3.org/~lcsc/lcsc-distribution-v1-0-beta/

A zip file of the complete package is also available for download
from this location.  The official copy of the Committee Draft will
soon be available at

   http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/lcsc/UBLv1-beta/

Many thanks to Peter Yim for use of his web site during
construction of the Beta draft.

The UBL 1.0 Beta package is intended to provide the specifications
needed to begin implementation testing of UBL in advance of its
recommendation to OASIS for standardization. The implementation
testing phase begins now and will end two weeks prior to the UBL
TC meeting in Washington D.C. 23-27 February 2004. An
implementation subcommittee (UBL ISC) is has been formed to
coordinate input received during implementation testing.

With regard to the normative components, this draft is intended to
represent UBL 1.0 as it will be released next year, with the
exception of code list validation (which will be addressed by a
Code List Subcommittee that has been formed for this purpose) and
fixes for any major problems that may be discovered during the
implementation phase. With regard to the non-normative aspects of
the draft, in particular the page formatting, illustrations, and
documentation, this release is still just a draft and will be
subject to further editorial work during the implementation phase.

Jon Bosak
Chair, OASIS UBL TC