OASIS UBL ITLSC Report
18th August 2009
New Members
- Andrea Caccia - Innovery S.p.A. has recently joined the UBL ITLSC andcontributed with several inputs to make UBL more attractive to the Italian Public Administration.
Andrea Caccia is a member of AITI (Italian Treasurers Association) which is representing the Italian Corporates in the EU for the SEPA project (Single Euro Payment Area).
Innovery is a primary company in Italy on the digital signature field, and it is strongly interested into applying the XAdES Signature to UBL.
- Ing. Piero De Sabbata (ENEA) has joined the UBL ITLSC and together the co-chair Arianna Brutti (ENEA) has multiplied the ENEA efforts on UBL by concretely contributing to the upcoming UBL 2.1 minor release.
New Liaisons
Italian Public Administration
In 2008 UBL ITLSC has been officially invited by CNEL (National Council for Economy and Labour) to present UBL and its localization work.
This year the UBL ITLSC has been officially involved into an inter-Ministerial table on e-Invoicing for the purpose of presenting the actual status of UBL and to match the Italian P.A. invoicing requirements against UBL 2.0.
A short introduction of the OASIS Consortium and UBL TC structure has been also provided to inform the P.A. about the concrete UBL support available.
Roberto Cisternino is the actual liaison with the Public Administration, and Arianna Brutti (ENEA) is also participating and acting as a backup to ensure the UBL ITLSC presence to all meetings.
The UBL ITALIA name is often used in place of UBL ITLSC as it seems there is a difficulty to pronounce its name, anyway I clarified the difference and still represents a permanent technology transfer initiative for UBL endorsed by OASIS in 2007 during our 1st UBL Day Workshop.
SCIC– AITI – CNEL
As mentioned into the 2008 UBL ITLSC report we have a close relationship with the SCIC.
SCIC
Inter-associativeSteering Committee composed by:
AITI – Italian Association of Corporate Treasurers (EACT)
ANDAF - National Association of Administrative and Financial Directors
ACMI - Italian Association of Credit Managers
The SCIC steering committee is providing a unique interface to the Italian Corporates involved into the e-Invoicing against the Public Administration and interested into e-Payments (see SEPA).
Through SCIC we have the opportunity to obtain all Italian requirements for e-Invoicing and e-Payments(but not limited to this).
SCIC has also a direct channel with the Italian permanent Table on Paperless Trading and STP (c/o CNEL), this reason there is a synergy between ITLSC, SCIC and CNEL, and it seems our contribute is essential to have the Italian P.A. deciding which eBusiness Standard will have to be used in Italy.
New Initiatives
Payment Process and Security initiatives
Either UBL FIRTG (Financial Information Requirements Task Group) and UBL Security SC have been both sponsored by UBL ITLSC and its members.
- UBL FIRTG has completed a set of requirements and is going to review a final list within its members. The work has been delayed by lack of resources (see BII effort), but FIRTG intends to provide its effort to UBL TC asap.
- UBL Security SCis working on a draft guideline to adopt the XAdES (ETSI) digital signature within UBL.
Andrea Caccia, member of UBL Security SC, and UBL ITLSC is also acting as the liaison with ETSI.
Again the synergy between all of these initiatives and SCs is greatly simplifying the work and we all hope there will be soon a concrete result.
Long-term archiving and UBL
UBL ITLSC has recently started an informative dialogue with Adobe Italia to understand if the incorporation of UBL instances into the PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005) is viable.
PDF/A is an optimal solution for business document long-term preservation (archiving). The possibility to embed XML datasets and to apply digital signatures is completing the PDF/A for B2B.
Adobe Italia seems to be strongly skilled on this aspects as the Italian legislation has a particular attention on these topics.
About digital signatures, the PDF/A is already recognized by many countries for long-term archiving according local regulations. It seems PDF/A is an alternative to XAdES for long-term archiving.
UBL Adoption in the P.A.
This year has seen a particular interest on UBL by major Italian industries recently stressed to introduce several innovations on the banking (ePayment) and commerce (eInvoicing) fields.
With 4,3 million of enterprises, Italy represents alone the 21% of the European enterprises (20,2 million), this explains why there is a particular attention by Adobe and other vendors in this area, but also explain why the Italian Public Administration has an important decision to take and we expect now some evolutions in september.
The industry and banking sectors are actually divided on the eBusiness standard to adopt, this reason the P.A. is aiming to find the best solution for all.
As part of the ITLSC support to the Italian P.A. to evaluate UBL, the UBL 2.0 Invoice has been mapped to the P.A. requirements with a 98-99% positive result. The UBL Extensions is finally providing the 100%.
WS/BII
The WS/BII has been also considered to map at least the “core” Invoice with the Italian P.A. requirements, and the result has been around the 90%.
Basically the P.A. requirements are a superset of the core BII, but also the “core” Italian Invoice is a superset of the BII core (for few missing info).
Some issues have been explained to Georg Birgisson and are partly listed as FIRTG issues too.
UBL ITLSC intends to comment the BII public review in September.
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OASIS UBL ITLSC
Co-chair
Roberto Cisternino