Before two businesses can engage in a business-tobusiness process an agreement about the process execution order and the business documents exchanged in the collaborative process must be found. Although several initiatives from different industries have started standardization initiatives for business documents a set of shortcomings still remain. (1) The different standards do not have a common semantic basis causing inter-operability problems between them. (2) Furthermore, they try to include every possible element any industry might need into the business document standard. (3) Moreover, most of the standards are transfer syntax specific and do not provide a conceptual representation mechanism. In this article a new concept for the standardization of business documents called UN/CEFACT's Core Components Technical Specification is presented which solves these shortcomings. Using Core Components the business document modeler can unambiguously define documents with a common semant...