ACORD Brings Insurance Industry to OASIS

ACORD, the insurance industry standards organization, has become the latest industry group to appoint a representative to the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) Technical Committee. ACORD 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.

“ACORD has been a long time advocate of working with other organizations to achieve interoperability across industries,” said Gregory Maciag, CEO of ACORD. “Insurance is not only a vertical market, but also an integral part of international supply chain management. The UBL effort brings together major players in the standards arena to develop ebXML compliant solutions. This is very important to our industry.”

Other organizations with liaisons to UBL include: ARTS, representing retail sales; ASC X12, representing 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.

“Input from these pivotal industry groups ensures that UBL reflects the needs of the marketplace,” commented 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 UBL gives industry groups the opportunity to shape the outcome of our work together.”