XML and Industrial Standards for Electronic Commerce

Abstract

With the rapid adoption of XML as the meta data format for electronic commerce applications, many XML-based industrial standards for electronic commerce have been proposed. Since XML only defines a standardized syntax that introduces new tags used to represent data semantics, the task of defining a common set of tags and organizing tags into Data Type Definitions (DTDs) is left to developers of XML applications. XML applications do not interact with each other if their tags and DTDs are different. In this paper, we discuss and compare seven industrial standards for electronic commerce based on XML. They are BizTalk, CBL, cXML, IOTP, OAGIS, OCF, and RETML. Each standard is categorized according to its coverage of business activities. The following observations are made after examining industrial standards from different perspectives. Firstly, XML has a big impact on industrial standards for electronic commerce. Secondly, most industrial standards are not quite mature at the current stage, and there are no apparent leaders among the competitors. Thirdly, the complexity of their DTDs varies quantitatively and qualitatively. Fourthly, the integration of industrial standards is imperative if applications based on different standards intend to exchange XML documents smoothly.

Improving the usability of standard schemas

“…However, this flexibility is accompanied by an increase in complexity of structure and semantics and, more importantly, in usability. For example, in the e-business domain, [3] provides a rigorous account of the complexity of several different XML e-business standard schemas showing that as the volume and/or complexity of information represented by a standard schema increases, so too does its complexity. To quantitatively compare standard schemas, [3] used the number of structures (e.g., elements, and sub-structures) as a proxy of the complexity of a standard schema and found for every single type of structure considered, OAGIS, a cross-industry XML standard schema for business applications -the most complex standard schema of those considered -had the greatest number of structures and OCF, the simplest standard schema, had the fewest.…”

“…To send the purchase order to the manufacturer, the customer uses an XML-based e-business standard schema such as OAGIS. However, a different Internet commerce XML standard schema such as Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP) [7] is required for the manufacturer to send the payment to the bank [3]. As in the domain of e-business, there is ample evidence for the existence of multiple standard schemas in the fields of finance, biology and legislation: between [27] and [8], nine different finance XML standard schemas were presented; in the field of systems biology [9] found eighty-five different XML standard schemas; and, [14] identified six different key legislative XML standard schemas in Europe.…”

“…This process requires users, such as domain experts, to be able to understand multiple standard schemas and possibly compare them as well which exacerbates the problem. The frustration that domain practitioners have experienced with these problems has been well-documented in the evaluation of the use of standard schemas in practice in many individual domains (such as civil engineering [2], commerce [3,4,5,6], finance [7,8], biology [9,10,11] and legislation [12,13,14]). While these studies validate that standard schemas fall short in exactly the scenarios above, they are focused on fixing the standard schema for the domain rather than the more global, cross-domain problem of how to deal with the fact that standard schemas will inevitably not be able to be used for all needs in all applications.…”

Modeling Business Entity State Centric Choreographies

“…An overview of XML business document standards is provided by Li [13]. These standards are also limited to the format of the business documents and do not consider the document flow.…”

An Analysis of Integration Problems of XML-Based Catalogs for B2B Electronic Commerce

“…A B2B mediator has to integrate both suppliers' and buyers' formats to allow them to do contracting with one another. This makes the problem of standard integration and interoperation a very important one (see (Li 2000) and (Ng, Yan, and Lim 2000) for an overview).…”