Members of the Open Interchange Consortium [OIC] including Sun Microsystems Australia and 
Software Engineering Australia - NSW formed the XML & E-commerce Special Interest Group 
[XZIG] in November 1999.

Around September 1999 UN/CEFACT announced in conjunction with Tradegate Australia the formation
of ebXML Australia as the XML development operation for OASIS - Organisation for the 
Advancement of Structured Information Standards.

The OIC has been a member of ebXML Australia since July 2000 and attended all meetings.

E-BUSINESS DATES AND TIMES

A key issue for all E-business transactions particularly international trade is dates and time. 
Dates and Times are involved with all business transactions eg settlement dates, attendance in 
Courts, shipping time and dates.

OIC members have reviewed the ISO Standard 8601 for E-business transactions.  ISO 8601 provides
a number of standards for dates.  OIC members have adopted one of those standards for E-business
transactions. This date standard option can be viewed here

XML REGISTRIES

OIC members have develop a number of XML templates that can be licensed on a no fee or no charge
basis provided the software developer or end-user is a registered member of an XML Registry.

These Registries may be able to provide a number of services for members that wish to engage in
Electronic Business Information Interchange including:

1	a record of coding fields that a software developer has included in a software package

2	provide a certificate of EII Compliance for Mandatory fields in the software

3	An update of changes, applications and developments in EII classifications

4	Electronic Notary for business information interchange5	Automated backup for SME members

6	Disaster Recovery capability

7	E-business Dispute Resolution

These templates were researched and developed to assist software developers to provide effective
Electronic Information Interchange [EII] for Small and Medium-size Enterprises [SMEs] and Small 
& Medium-size Organisations [SMOs].

SMEs AND SMOs normally do not have in-house Information Technology expertise and tend to 
purchase/licence software packages.

The larger Organisations with IT Departments will have the expertise to develop the interfaces 
to link the electronic information exchanged with SMEs and SMOs into the Large Organisation
information repositories.