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Chapter 3 E-business infrastructure 147

Examples of XML applications
One widely adopted XML application is the Dublin Core meta-data initiative (DCMI)
(www.dublincore.org), so called since the steering group first met in Dublin, Ohio in 1995,
has been active in defining different forms of meta-data to support information access
across the Internet. An important part of this initiative is in defining a standard method of
referencing web documents and other media resources. If widely adopted this would make it
much more efficient to search for a document produced by a particular author in a particu-
lar language in a particular date range. Up to now, it has mainly been applied within content
management systems to assist in knowledge management for data on intranets and extranets
rather than on the public Internet.
The significance of XML is indicated by its use for facilitating supply chain management.
For example, Microsoft’s BizTalk server (www.microsoft.com/biztalk) for B2B application
integration is based on XML. Since this is a proprietary standard, an open standard ‘Roset-
taNet’ (www.rosettanet.org) has been created by a consortium of many of the world’s
leading information technology, electronic components and semiconductor manufacturing
companies such as Intel, Sony and Nokia. BizTalk server enables different enterprise applica-
tions such as SAP and JDEdwards to exchange information as part of improved supply chain
management. Microsoft summarize the benefits of BizTalk as:

1 Reduced ‘time to value’, i.e. development time and cost of application integration
2 Easy integration with virtually any application or technology
3 Scalability to any size of application
4 Support for industry standards such as EDI, XML and Simple Object Access Protocol
(SOAP)
5 Reliable document delivery including ‘once-only’ delivery of documents, comprehensive
document tracking, and logging and support for failover (automatic recovery of docu-
ments from a backup system)
6 Secure document exchange – this is not an integral feature of XML but has been built
into this application
7 Automation for complex business processes
8 Management and monitoring of business processes
9 Automated trading partner management
10 Reduced complexity in development.
Another widely adopted application of XML is ebXML (www.ebxml.org). This standard has
been coordinated by Oasis (www.oasis-open.org) which is an international not-for-profit
consortium for promoting Internet standards. The original project was intended to define

business exchange using five standards:
business processes (support for different activities and transactions involved in buying and
selling online)
core data components
collaboration protocol agreements
messaging
registries and repositories.
Oasis defines three types of transactions that form business processes:
1 Business Transaction. A single business transaction between two partners, such as placing
an order or shipping an order.
2 Binary Collaboration. A sequence of these business transactions, performed between two
partners, each performing one role.
3 MultiParty Collaboration. A series of binary collaborations composed of a collection of
business partners.