Commerce One and XML

To enable the network economy to grow, it is essential that business documents, forms, and messages must be understood by a variety of systems as they flow from business to business. Commerce One has adopted XML as the foundation of xCBL and the key enabling technology to accomplish this interoperability for e-commerce.

So why is XML a good enabling technology?

XML provides:

• A markup specification for creating self-descriptive data.
• A platform and application-independent data format.
• A way to validate data structures.
• A syntax that can be understood by computers and humans.
• An incremental way to advance web applications used for electronic commerce.

The e-commerce benefits of XML include:

• Businesses can describe services in a manner that can be widely understood by users.
• One set of documents, forms, and messages can be exchanged by businesses with different internal business systems.
• Data can be transformed through gateways reducing errors in re-keying data.
• Frequent changes in business processes can be handled without substantial engineering cost.

Investment in legacy systems is leveraged and can be used with the latest Internet technology. The XML standard makes it possible for anyone to develop tag sets and definitions. The ease of use makes it easy to customize a company-specific language. However, if every company were to develop their own language, there would be no interoperability and years of hard work and understanding from the EDI standardization process would have been thrown away. This knowledge is too valuable to waste and the industry has acted upon it by engaging Commerce One and the electronic commerce community at large in the XML standardization process. The goal is to create the most robust, open framework for electronic commerce based on XML.