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New XML e-business
standard introduced A consortium of
technology companies and a United Nations organization have finalized a
new e-business Web standard that will provide a variety of businesses with
a common way of conducting trades online. The group, dubbed Oasis,
which includes IBM, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard and
others, has worked with a U.N. technology group for the last 18
months to create a blueprint for businesses to use XML
(Extensible Markup Language) to connect to one another and make trades
online. The U.N. group and Oasis approved the standard at a meeting in
Vienna on Friday. XML
is a Web standard for exchanging data over the Internet. The work by Oasis
and the U.N. group is one of many collaborative efforts
by the technology industry to make XML the preferred language for
communication online. It's being used, for example, to help tech companies
offer software as a service
over the Web. Oasis and the U.N.
group have built Electronic Business XML, or ebXML, which will allow
companies, whether they are in the same industries or not, to communicate
over the Web. The new standard
defines a common way for companies to handle and route data to one another
and offers a set of guidelines for specific industries to define their own
XML
vocabularies. While industries define "price" the same way,
shoe manufacturing and financial companies, for example, will need their
own XML vocabularies to describe data. And the travel industry must define
the data structure for travel, destination and restrictions. ebXML is designed to
make it easier for businesses in a common industry to communicate; but the
standard is also geared toward making it easier for these different
vocabularies to be used together. Various industries
building their own vocabularies have begun to rally
around ebXML. For example, RosettaNet--which has defined an XML standard
that helps tech companies exchange information among suppliers,
manufacturers and buyers--previously used its own method of swapping XML
messages. But it's since adopted ebXML's communications standard for
message swapping, according to an Oasis representative. Proponents of ebXML
say the standard will allow companies using older data-exchange
technology, called Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, to start using
more flexible and potentially cheaper XML-based software. Microsoft, whose
executives have not ruled out support for ebXML, has its own competing
set of XML guidelines called BizTalk.
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