InformationWeek

XML is a World Wide Web Consortium standard designed to let applications recognize information passed to them by other applications. For instance, an application could recognize that the document it just received from a trading partner's system is a purchase order and that it contains an order number and several product names.

But XML is still too rigid to let applications deal on-the-fly with the vast range of formats and types of information that could arrive from trading partners over the Internet.

That's why the consortium is working on the XML schema, an extension to the standard that lets applications agree, for instance, on the number of lines in a street address contained in an electronic document. The standard could simplify development of E-commerce applications.

"The upcoming schema will let developers dynamically identify key information, such as price, date, and product description, making XML a true multipurpose E-commerce vehicle," says Rita Knox, a VP and research director at Gartner Group.

"As we move from the brick-and-mortar world, with a finite number of partners, to Net commerce involving thousands of partners, it's hard to negotiate on-the-fly between partners about how every individual data type should look," says Dave Hollander, co-chair for the consortium's XML schema working group and co-chair for the XML coordination group and plenary. "That's the flexibility that XML schema brings to making E-commerce dynamic."

For some time, software vendors have added XML extensions to their enterprise software and XML servers that let developers build prepackaged business objects and applications logic by describing different kinds of data in XML.

Several industry consortiums, such as CommerceNet, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, and RosettaNet are pushing forward with industry-specific XML vocabularies for uniform description of products and business processes. In addition, individual vendors, including Ariba Inc. and Commerce One Inc., have readied XML architectural frameworks that let their own and third-party applications be plugged in, reducing the integration work and providing close interoperability.

Hollander says that once the schema recommendation is finalized this summer, most vendors will incorporate it within a few months. However, the promise of XML lies in how well it's implemented by all parties.