1.3 XML and e-business

XML opens up data so that you can share it among your organization, partners, customers, and suppliers — without sharing or integrating your critical business systems.

From the development team’s point of view, this means they no longer have to use proprietary mechanisms for formatting data passed between applications or stored in files or databases. From the vendors’ and business partners’ points of view, this means they can easily exchange information.

Finally, for the e-business, XML provides an open, cross-platform way to transact, manage, and share information. Businesses can leverage data currently residing in hard-to-reach or non-integrated legacy systems and share information across the heterogeneous environment of the Web. XML helps improve business-to-business transactions by combining the power of electronic data interchange (EDI) with the simplicity of the Web. This combination of technologies fuses Web data interchange — based on XML— with existing EDI business methods and structures.

For example, using an XML-based solution, the health care industry can create vocabularies for medical patient information that can be easily shared among doctors, insurance companies and patients. This capability enables medical professionals to access common information — without worrying about the hardware and software that they use to run their respective businesses. In this way, patients will benefit of a more efficient processing of medical claims between doctors and insurance companies, tighter integration of patient history, and better customer service.

Following is a list of the main advantages that XML provides in e-business. XML is:

• Simple It is a text-based tag language that people and computers can easily understand.

• Extensible Diverse data with specific meaning for a given community can be freely exchanged. You can invent custom tags and vocabularies for any purpose and share them across interest groups.

• Interoperable Data sharing does not depend on any particular software or hardware platform.

• Mature Although the specification was announced in February 1998, it is a simplification of the proven SGML technology that originated from IBM research in the 1960s.

• International Built-in support for Unicode, an international language encoding standard that supports any script in the world today. This makes transnational data accessible to the programmer.