The XML Common Business Library (xCBL) is a freely distributed set of e-commerce documents. It began life in 1997 as Veo Systems’ CBL, becoming xCBL at version 2.0 in 1999 when Commerce One acquired Veo and made it interoperable with EDI. This allowed companies using EDI to update their applications to use XML.

XCBL uses a number of different formats. Currently xCBL is at 4.0, which uses XSDL schema rather than the SOX schema which were used in previous versions. xCBL 4.0 also marks the beginning of an alignment with the Universal Business Language (UBL).

xCBL contains a large number of document types covering a wide range of transactions, including Order, Order Response, Change Order, Invoice, Invoice Response, Remittance Advice and Advanced Ship Notice as well as documents for Sourcing.

The XML Common Business Library can be found at http://www.xcbl.org/