The Context Inspired Component Architecture (CICA) offers a method for building electronic business messages. The method presented employs a hierarchy of components designed to capture semantic business concepts in a manner that facilitates re-use. The architecture is syntax neutral by design. A complete set of attributes for describing the components and relationships of this architecture is defined. A specific syntactic representation for XML (Extensible Markup Language as defined by the W3C) is presented. The method represents CICA messages and components in XML Schema as defined by the W3C XML Schema 1.0 (XSD).