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.