Data standards for business have existed as long as people have been doing business. While businesses always strive to differentiate themselves, their common goals for profitability and growth, common external forces like competition and regulation, and overlapping business relationships with common suppliers or customers drive them to do things in similar ways. In particular, the fundamental requirement that their documents must be mutually intelligible for a business relationship to be possible inevitably causes both the document models and the sequence of exchanges between businesses to follow regular patterns. But how do we know what specific information these documents must contain and how do we ensure that their recipients understand them? UBL is a library of open standard electronic business components and document schemas that completes a missing aspect of e-commerce. Just as HTML and HTTP created the World Wide Web, UBL and Web Services such as those provided by ebXML create the environment for true world wide e-commerce. Developing UBL as a synthesis of already existing XML schemas and other existing EDI business libraries has been a proving ground for a new approach to designing business documents.