This is a generic standard not specifically focussed on agrifood. It was conceived as a cheaper alternative to EDI based approaches as it used XML (instead of EDI) (cf. the Oasis link). The main issues appear to be a lack of semantics and a great emphasis on procedures for analysis rather than direct solutions, which then results in a failure to provide real interoperability solutions (Rawlins 2001) . Furthermore, apart from a few specific exceptions, it is unclear whether there has been much uptake of the standard globally since its core components were finalised in 2006. Rawlins concludes that ebXML has been a failure because there has been so limited an uptake (Rawlins 2007). However, there have been recent Python implementations of the standard which indicates that interest is still alive ( https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cppa3 and https://pypi.python.org/pypi/keyinfo ). There has been a large academic literature concerning ebXML, and there continues to be publications referring to and extending the standard. The majority of academic publications were produced in the early 2000s, but work still continues including various attempts to integrate ebXML with semantic/ontology based approaches (e.g. (Heravi et al. 2014/9) . Lack of a clear semantic vocabulary (ontology) to describe business processes would appear to be the main weakness of this standard, with the consequence that different implementations will likely be incompatible. The move to formalise the standard in a set of ontologies would make this much more usable but this has not yet been officially adopted. First assessment made by Christopher Brewster.