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The UN/CEFACT Electronic Business Architecture

The UN/CEFACT Electronic Business Architecture (UEB) describes a high level architecture for an infrastructure to facilitate electronic business on a global scale in a secure, reliable and consistent manner. The architecture provides a logical view of the abstract architectural components in order to facilitate both Extensible Markup Language (XML) and other structured information exchanges such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) formats like UN/EDIFACT (United Nations Electronic Data Interchange for Administration and Transport). The eBusiness Architecture is considered a superset of the Electronic Business XML (ebXML) Technical Architecture , and serves to complement and extend that document.

In order to be independent of any specific implementation platform the UN/CEFACT Electronic Business Architecture breaks down all aspects of Business Collaborations into two sub-groups, the Business Operational View (BOV) and the Functional Service View (FSV), according to the principles of the Open-edi Reference Model, ISO/IEC 14662.

Furthermore the UN/CEFACT Electronic Business Architecture acknowledge that real-world business components must have counterparts in the electronic business infrastructure in order for the architecture to be capable of facilitating all aspects of business electronically. Thus the architecture prescribes the use of modeling techniques, e.g. the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM), as the basis for the business collaboration areas of the architecture.

The objective of the UN/CEFACT Electronic Business Architecture is to provide a flexible electronic business architecture that maintains a technology-neutral perspective where possible. Some of the key feature and capabilities of the UN/CEFACT Electronic Business Architecture are:

1. Platform independence

2. Event driven Architecture

3. Facilitation of multiple concurrent and/or different implementations

4. Component based architecture allowing eBusiness components to be added, deleted or modified

5. Allows proprietary protocol support, including custom extensions for industry standards. This refers to, but is not constrained by, electronic message payloads

6. Custom workflow, information and syntax definitions are allowed in support of unique business rules and requirements, as may be defined by users

7. Incremental phased implementation

8. Business to business interoperability

Source document
UN/CEFACT/TMG Electronic Business Architecture Technical Specification, Revision 0.83. (zip - 685 KB)

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