Standards bodies and software vendors are putting the final touches on a number of Web-services specifications that could revolutionize the way companies collaborate. The standards are related to XML, a language used by businesses to model enterprise data that's become an instrumental part of Web services. While the technology that underlies each of the new specs marks up data similarly to XML, its capabilities go far beyond that of XML's.

"This is something weird and different," says Howard Smith, chief technology officer at Computer Sciences Corp. Europe. "It's not Web services, it's not the reinvention of workflow, it's not process-management workflow, it's new. It unifies those things. It's like taking the best of every other paradigm and building a nice new model."

BPML, the Business Process Markup Language, is published by the Business Process Management Initiative, a group backed by dozens of major IT vendors, including BEA Systems, CSC, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. It released the first draft of the language in August. Compared with XML, BPML lets users model a company's business processes from top to bottom.

Using BPML, a company can define every action in a complex business process--anything from sending a price bid to executing a purchase and shipping goods. If every company used the language to define their processes, the processes would become interchangeable. Two companies that want to team on an order, a project, or a transaction could interact at the process level, not so much trading data as working together to perform different parts of common procedures. Tools based on BPML will do to processes what spreadsheets did to data: let companies treat their processes like easily definable objects that can be changed or linked to other processes with a simple point and click.

"What we're saying is if you wish to link and change and do that aggressively, you're not going to do it solely on the basis of traditional middleware and processes," Smith says. "You've got to treat processes as if they were data."

A consortium of businesses, including BEA, IBM, and Microsoft, has a competing standard, BPEL, or Business Process Execution Language, under construction. The first draft of the BPEL4WS (as in "for Web services") spec was born in August, when IBM and Microsoft brought together two existing technologies (IBM's WSFL, or Web Services Flow Language, and Microsoft's XLANG) to create the new standard. Paraic Sweeney, IBM's VP for business integration, describes the function of the new specification as similar in scope to technologies like Open Database Connectivity and Java.

ODBC and Java Database Connectivity provide a standardized way of talking to a database, independent from the developer that produces it, Sweeney says, and the same thing has occurred in application development and application servers with Java 2 Enterprise Edition. But in the whole business-process space, there hasn't been that level of standards implemented, he adds. Just as Java lets a company write an application once and have it run on any system, these languages would let an enterprise define a business process once and understand or implement it in any enterprise.