B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

160 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
Exchanged — In a connected business environment, companies should
be able to exchange and share data with multiple companies dynamically.
The data can be transferred using either dedicated connections or over
the Internet. In order for companies to exchange data on a real-time
basis, they have to establish a common taxonomy for defining the
structure and context of information.
XML is the universal language that helps companies achieve all of
the above tasks. It enables organizations to capture, manage, publish
and exchange information with their partners, suppliers and customers
as efficiently as possible.
The fundamentals of XML, its strengths and weakness and its
benefits over EDI are explained below.
6.4.2. What is XML?
XML is a language developed by W3C for visual presentation of
factual information that can facilitate the exchange of data between
applications and/or humans.
Although the origin of both HTML and XML is the same — Standard
Generalized Markup Language (SGML), HTML is designed primarily
for just the presentation of hypertext pages in browsers; XML, on the
other hand, is designed to create new markup languages for new
document types. HTML restricts the users to only a few set elements
defined by W3C such as , and . XML enables
the users to define new elements for processing information in their
particular domain, context or field. Creation of document types, tag
sets, building XML documents and the behavior of XML processor,
which parses the XML document, are all determined and based on
specifications of XML 1.0. The specification of XML can be obtained
at http://www.w3c.org/xml.
The concepts on which XML is built are pretty straightforward:
the meaning of the data in an XML document is specified by the
tags on data elements and the relationships between different data
elements in the same document is provided via simple nesting and
references. Thus XML not only specifies data elements, but also their
semantics.