B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 167
definitions of tags. XML document by itself does not provide much
information about how to interpret it.
Does not facilitate data transformation
The core problem in either EAI or B2Bi for all corporations is the
ability to transform and integrate data from one application to another.
However, XML is just another data format in the plethora of formats
used by a company.
6.4.7. XML namespaces
According to the W3C, an XML namespace is a collection of names,
identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) reference, which are
used in XML documents as element types and attribute names. XML
namespaces qualify element names in a recognizable manner to avoid
conflicts between elements with the same name. The elements contained
within an XML document can be defined in different schemas on the
Internet.
Since XML documents can contain data from multiple sources across
the Web, there is a great likelihood of element name overlapping. With
the use of namespaces, same element names will not conflict and
clarify their respective origins within an XML document. In other
words, these similar elements could refer back to different schemas
which uniquely qualify their semantics. A very simple example of
element repetition within an XML document is the use of in a
book purchase order. This element can be used for the book title,
author's title, publishing company's contact person title etc. It is worth
mentioning that namespaces do not give processing instructions for
elements. Users (application developers, etc.) have to know what the
elements mean and decide how to process them.
The W3C has released XML namespaces as a recommendation,
allowing elements to be subordinate to a URI. This enables users to
define private dictionaries of terms, or use a public namespace of
common terms.
Let's see the use of namespaces through an example.