New working drafts of the Technical Architecture and Messaging Service ebXML specifications are available for review.

The Technical Architecture specification is a high level specification that can be used as starting point to understand what ebXML is and the links between its various components:

This document describes the underlying Architecture for ebXML. It provides a high level overview of ebXML and describes the relationships, interactions, and basic functionality of ebXML Components. It should be used as a roadmap to learn: (1) what ebXML is, (2) what problems ebXML solves, and (3) core ebXML functionality.

The introduction describes the goals of the ebXML project, highlighting the importance of an approach relying on modeling Business Processes and not only the data being exchanged:

Instead of taking the data element (EDI) approach, objects are used to describe and model Business Processes.

The specification does include a section about conformance and an annex with three examples of ebXML business scenarios.

Comments should be sent to ebxml-architecture@lists.ebxml.org before November 10.

The Messaging Service specification defines the structure of the messages and the behavior of messaging services software.

Built on multipart mime messages, a ebXML message will consist of separate XML documents used as header and payload (content) documents.

The specification describes the mime containers to be used and the format of the headers and payload containers.

Sections about messaging flow, recovery processes and error reporting as well appendices with XML headers DTD and W3C XML Schema are also included.

Comments should be sent to ebXML-transport@lists.oasis-open.org before November 9.

Related story:

• New draft of the ebXML Technical Architecture Specification