introduction
Business is a collective name for one area of human enterprise: making money from selling things.
The things may be physical goods such as gizmos and doohickeys created in factories or virtual resources available over the Internet.
Some business transactions can be done by computers instead of people by following open standards such as UBL. E-commerce is part of business: it is any business activity done using the Internet.
what it is
People love getting together for a common purpose. A collection of people carrying out some activity such as charitable work, religious worship or obsessing over a hobby is called an enterprise. A business enterprise has the purpose of trading goods and services for money. A business enterprise might be a couple knocking out fluffy bunnies from their shed workshop or it might be might be several big companies under common ownership. The name "business enterprise" is usually shortened to "business". It is also called a "company", an "industrial undertaking", and a "commercial organization" (and, more simply and rather vaguely, as just "organization").
Every business enterprise trades their goods in the same basic way. There are three business parties involved.
- a buyer of goods
- a seller of goods
- a recipient of goods
A party is anyone or anything that understands how to trade. It may be a person, a government agency or even a computer. These three parties get together to carry out a trade lifecycle (a lifecycle is a list of the states something goes through from beginning to end). A simple business trade lifecycle goes like this.
- The buyer places an order for goods.
- The seller confirms the order.
- The seller despatches the goods to the recipient.
- The seller sends an invoice to the buyer.
- The buyer pays the invoice.
Actions like the ones listed in these steps are called business transactions. A trade lifecycle needs business documents to make it work. The simple trade lifecycle above creates these business documents.
- purchase order
- shipping notice
- invoice
- receipt
The only kind of business relevant to the LIC is an organization that has a computer network and wants to carry out e-commerce. E-commerce is a business enterprise where the business transactions are carried out over computer networks. The most convenient network is the Internet. This is also the most open to abuse. Other electronic networks, such as telephone networks and fax networks, are not used for e-commerce. That's so 80s.
Doing business transactions by computers is much faster and cheaper and less error prone than doing transactions using people. The aim of many organizations is to automate as many business transactions as possible. Making business transactions work over the Internet is easier said than done. There are many pieces to the puzzle and one is what protocols to use so computers from different enterprises can talk to each other.
One common way of computerising business transactions is to follow a set of standards called EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). This is basically a fancy form of e-mail that can deal with business documents such as invoices, bills, and purchase orders.
A more recent way of making e-commerce work is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML is used for making simple data stores that can easily be turned into messages and sent across the Internet, and easily processed by a receiving computer. There are two new open standards called UBL and ebXML that can be used by anyone to do e-commerce over the Internet.
A consortium called OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) created a library of standard data components called UBL 1.0 (Universal Business Language, version 1). UBL is used to turn business documents into XML. UBL is an open standard. Microsoft and the automotive industry have their own closed standards for doing the same job.
An enterprise can use UBL to make business documents but it needs another set of standards to do something with those documents. OASIS created a set of standards called ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language) that describe how to carry UBL documents over the Internet.
what it isn't
Charity. If everyone had enough to be content, what would the world be like?
where it is
Everywhere.
history
In 1990 the UN defined rules for EDI, called UN/EDIFACT (United Nations rules for Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce and Transport).
In 1993 the not-for-profit consortium OASIS was created.
In 1998 the W3C organization approved XML.
In 1999 OASIS and the United Nations started the ebXML project.
In 2004 UBL 1.0 was released by OASIS. ISO (International Standards Organization) approved ebXML as an ISO standard (ISO15000).
