Launch of BASDA Green XML
BASDA (Business & Application Software Developers’ Association) has announced the up-coming launch of a 'Green-XML' data exchange standard that will support organisations worldwide in collecting, exchanging and reporting on environmental impacts. The standard will enable business software developers to incorporate into their applications ways of automatically collecting data on 'green' issues such as carbon footprints and embedded water.
The BASDA Green-XML Standard is to be launched at a Masterclass on July 13th at the first Global Business of Biodiversity Symposium at Excel, London. Delegates will learn how the standard will allow business applications to automatically exchange transactions such as procurement data that have carbon footprint information built in. This capability will be have great value in supporting carbon reporting, which is likely to become madatory for many organisations in the next few years.
BASDA’s new standard is a critical step to enabling mainstream accounting systems to provide carbon and other forms of green accounting as part of business as usual with no additional costs to business. BASDA members will also demonstrate other solutions critical to green accounting including universal carbon footprints, provided by @UK PLC, and an environmental performance management solution from the UNIT4 Group.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report, which will be released at the summit, is going to call for bio-diversity accounting. BASDA and its members have spent the last two years removing the barriers to universal carbon accounting by developing BASDA Green XML, and so will be able to deliver bio-diversity accounting in a shorter time frame.
BASDA members of the eBusiness Special Interest Group have initiated a completely new Green Extension within the current project to update the BASDA eBis-XML data exchange standard V3.09, with development of the Green Extension led by Ronald Duncan of @UK PLC. The Special Interest Group as a whole is working hard towards achieving Version 3.10, and this proposed extension will add enormous value, and raise the profile of BASDA among many new sectors
Jairo Rojas, BASDA’s Director General, said: “This is a great example of where BASDA has taken the lead and undertaken an important development on behalf of all its members - saving the duplicated effort from each member and ensuring an industry-wide standard approach to collecting carbon tracking and related environmental data. At the same time, this supports interoperability between the applications offered by BASDA members and reporting to government and non-government agencies involved in achieving carbon reduction targets.
BASDA eBIS XML was developed in 1999, and has become the most widely used XML format since it was adopted by the major application software providers as a vendor-neutral protocol that allows all applications to interoperate, and exchange orders and invoices electronically. The Hub Alliance, a global network of leading e-business exchanges, confirms that BASDA XML is the predominant form used, and its interoperability is a mandatory condition for exchanges that join the Hub Alliance.
BASDA eBIS XML is now a mature stable standard, and has not required any updates in the past five years, however as part of the current review, BASDA is once again leading the way by adding this Green Extension. Indeed, BASDA is the first body to add a green extension to XML, and has been working on the extension for the past two years in consultation with other bodies. The concept grew from the commitment of BASDA members to the BASDA Green Charter, and the requirement to enable green accounting in BASDA members’ applications. Tim Cole, director of BASDA member Causeway, and chair of the eBusiness SIG says: "the objective behind BASDA Green XML is to define a data structure that supports the full scope of Green information, that businesses will need increasingly to process and exchange, and that BASDA members will need to support within and between their applications. The eBis data standard will be able to draw on this to support the components relevant to specific documents types, such as invoices, orders, product data etc".
A major driver behind the development of BASDA Green XML is that Carbon Emission trading is now a significant international business, and furthermore, there is a movement towards legislating for carbon accounting for all businesses. Without an agreed standard for interoperability between systems however, it will not be possible to extend from the current very large projects with significant measurement overhead, to a business-as-usual landscape. Thus there is a requirement for XML interoperability standards to be created and tested, so that financial software can be updated to support carbon, and other message types.
Kevin Misselbrook, Customer Services Director of BASDA member Access UK Ltd, commented, "Access fully endorses the new extended 'Green' BASDA eBis-XML schema, which will give industries the ability to include carbon data within the same financial transaction as the related shipped goods. Whilst there are debates over the methodologies used to calculate the carbon cost associated with products, there is significant value in having the facility to account for these carbon emissions as this will provide a much better understanding of the supply chain impact on the corporate carbon footprint."
BASDA GREEN XML CONTENT BASDA Green XML has the following 'Green' sections: · Carbon footprints and offsets · Embedded/virtual water These two elements will be the most popular items for immediate use, but the standard will also incorporate: 0 · Waste management · COSHH/REACH data sets · Bio-Diversity · Input/Output analysis BASDA has already recruited external experts for each area (from organisations such as DEFRA, WASTE Management and COSHH) who are contributing towards content, but is currently seeking feedback from from a wider audiance for ratification later this year, and general release in early 2011. An example of the code is available for view and comment at http://www.basda.org/basda-green-xml-44089.htm