OASIS UBL Technical Committee at age 20 - October 29, 2001-2021

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

The first official OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) Technical 
Committee meeting was convened by the very respected Jon Bosak, its 
first and longtime chairman, twenty years ago on October 29, 2001, in 
Menlo Park, California. The four-day meeting ended November 1, 2001:

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl/200111/msg00005.html

While no voting participant from that meeting is active in the 
committee these days, those people laid the foundation for the 
success of UBL today that was only anticipated at the time. 
Personally, Jon didn't pull me in to write stylesheets for the 
committee until two months later in January 2002. I didn't become a 
voting member until March 2003 as the founding chairman of the Forms 
Presentation subcommittee.

Here, twenty years after the committee was founded, the UBL Standard 
is widely recognized, adopted, and embraced around the world for 
procurement and for logistics/transportation. It brings to any 
business document project a rich repertoire of agreed-upon 
established business semantics for standardized business objects. It 
also standardizes the corresponding XML interchange labels and 
structures used between trading partners or between their network 
intermediaries.

Version 0.7 released in 2003 proposed the first invoice and it went 
into production across Denmark. Version 1.0 included eight 
procurement document types. Version 2.1 is the first release that has 
been internationally standardized as ISO/IEC 19845:2015. The 
recently-released version 2.3 supports 91 different document types. 
And UBL is only growing from here.

Over the years the committee has included many esteemed members of 
the worldwide community of business and technical experts. Of note, 
Tim McGrath served as a committee co-chair with Jon for many years, 
bringing to the committee his business document acumen. Kenneth 
Bengtsson now leads the committee into the future with his own 
international business expertise. The committee is in good hands going forward.

I cannot list all the very many excellent and tireless committee 
members who have contributed over the past 20 years the committee has 
been working. One can peek through the archives at meeting minutes to 
see how the face of UBL has changed and been enriched through the 
years by these wonderful people:

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl

Congratulations to all of the committee members over the years for 
the quality of the results of your efforts. You have created 
something special that the community finds valuable and essential in 
day-to-day business around the world.

Well done!

G. Ken Holman
Former co-chairman, former chairman, former project editor, current evangelist
October 29, 2021



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