ebXML: The New Global Standard for Doing Business on the Internet by Alan Kotok, David Webber

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
ebXML may be the key enabler for next-generation global e-commerce: a powerful new standard for describing, exchanging, and integrating business processes and agreements among companies, partners, and customers. Now, there's a complete, up-to-the-minute briefing for every businessperson and IT pro who must decide whether and how to implement ebXML.

Alan Kotok and David R. R. Webber first review "the story so far": why the ebXML initiative was established, what its goals are, and what it's accomplished so far. They offer an "in-a-nutshell" overview of ebXML's components, architecture, and process flows, followed by a chapter of scenarios for ebXML use (it's too early, unfortunately, to present live case study successes). Next, they explain how ebXML builds on -- or relates to -- EDI, XML, UML, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, and other strategic technologies. (While they do present Microsoft's BizTalk initiative, we'd have liked a clearer discussion of how BizTalk and ebXML compete with, or complement, each other.)

In a detailed introduction to ebXML's technical architecture, you'll learn exactly how ebXML utilizes business process specifications, registries, and repositories. The authors review the issues associated with establishing ebXML-based trading partner relationships; introduce ebXML messaging services; and explain ebXML's core components: common data items that share the same meaning no matter what message they appear in. The book ends with a look at the process of getting a company up and running with ebXML.

If you're developing with ebXML, you'll still need the standards documents. But if you want a thorough understanding of the technology for planning and decision-making purposes, this is your book. (Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. He served for nearly ten years as vice president of a New Jersey–based marketing company, where he supervised a wide range of graphics and web design projects. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

From the Publisher

Businesses have come to realize that information resources and technologies are key corporate assets and decisions on these matters need to be made at the highest level in an enterprise (including public sector and not-for-profit organizations). As a result, when new standards come along with the potential for expanding collaborative e-business relationships that open new opportunities, improve cash flow, and reduce costs, business people need to know about them. That is the purpose of the new book, ebXML: the New Global Standard for doing Business On the Internet. The book describes this new set of specifications not only in terms of the technology, but also in terms of their impact on the way business really work.

Most of the larger enterprises in the world have done e-business for as long as 20 years, using a technology called electronic data interchange or EDI. While these larger companies have benefited from EDI, smaller companies rarely can afford the software or the internal management EDI requires. EbXML however, takes advantage of advances in Internet technologies and the large installed base of Internet-connected systems, to encourage the development of low-priced, plug-and-play solutions that many smaller companies can afford.

The book outlines the demanding and changing business conditions that make collaborative e-business imperative for growing numbers of companies, and show how ebXML is designed to meet these conditions. It offers an executive-level overview giving the ebXML specifications in a nutshell and scenarios of how ebXML can work in practice. The book then provides fuller descriptions of ebXMLs business requirements, XML, earlier work involving XML for business data exchange, related web services specifications, and more details of the ebXML technical architecture.

ebXML: the New Global Standard for doing Business On the Internet is the first book on ebXML, and the only extended work so far, either print or electronic, written for business managers. The technical documentation provides specific guidance for systems developers, but it is the business people who make the fundamental business decisions on using technology strategically, and this book addresses those concerns.

Booknews

This book is about doing electronic business (e-business) and a new initiative called electronic business XML (ebXML), designed to extend the benefits of e-business. It describes how the ebXML specifications can open new markets and higher productivity, and discusses the development of the specifications under the guidance of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards and the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. Material is written to be accessible to both business and technical readers. Kotok is a reporter and writer on technology, business, and public policy. Webber is vice-president for business development with an XML technology company. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Product Details

• ISBN: 0641505140
  
• ISBN-13: 9780641505140
• Format: Paperback, 339pp
• Publisher: Pearson Education
• Pub. Date: July 2001
• Edition Description: Bargain
• Sales Rank: 220,322
• Series: Voices That Matter Series

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

Preface

For some time, the search has been on for a "new EDI," a method of exchanging standard business documents that would be simple and cheap enough that the benefits of EDI would be opened up to large and small companies alike, no matter where in the world they were located.The vision of the new solution was one in which the intelligence needed to interpret electronic business documents could be somehow encapsulated with the documents themselves.This would permit a company to create an electronic purchase order, for example, and send it over the Internet to a company it had never done business with before, and have that purchase order be interpreted and processed at the receiving end. Many schemes have been advanced. Alan and David review most of them in their book. Indeed, they were personally involved with some of the research efforts, as was our Center.

In 1999, for example, one of our graduate students, Rene Kasan, developed a prototype operating environment for XML/EDI under the aegis of the XML/edi Group. David was one of our external advisors on the project. Some elements of that work were carried forward to the ebXML Registry and Repository specifications.

As of this writing, there seems to be a consensus building around ebXML as being the most promising of the candidate solutions. The web site, ebXML.org, describes it as follows:

(A) set of specifications that together enable a modular electronic business framework. The vision of ebXML is to enable a global electronic marketplace where enterprises of any size and in any geographical location can meet and conduct business with each other through the exchange of XML based messages. ebXML is a joint initiative of the United Nations (UN/CEFACT) and OASIS, developed with global participation for global usage.

-Donald j. McCubbrey, Ph.D.
Director, Center for the Study of Electronic Commerce
Daniels College of Business
University of Denver
Denver, Colorado, USA

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 4: The Promise of XML

What Is XML?

By focusing on the content and detailing the precise business context, XML makes it possible for systems in remote locations to exchange and interpret such documents without human intervention. This ability to automatically send, retrieve, interpret, transform, and process the data in electronic messages is of course critical to the conduct of electronic business itself.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed XML in 1996–97, and officially released version 1.0 in February 1998.¹ While XML is widely recognized as a technology and the W3C is a highly respected organization, drawing its membership from both major software vendors and academic institutions, the W3C chooses to call its fully approved technical documents recommendations rather than standards, to avoid anti-competitive lawsuits in the U.S. Recommendations represent a consensus within the W3C as well as the approval of the W3C director, now Tim Berners-Lee. As recommendations, documents such as the XML specifications demonstrate stability and are considered ready for widespread implementation and business use.²

Markup: Seeing Is Believing

You can see HTML markup by opening any web page with Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator. Using the top-level menu in the browser, select View, Source (Internet Explorer) or View, Page Source (Netscape).What you see displayed is the internal HTML syntax that the browser uses to render the page content you see onscreen. The familiar web page with its human-readable text and images are exposed as machine-readable computer markup code. Notice that the code contains a lot of instructions in angle brackets, such as <HTML>, <BODY>, <HEAD>, <TITLE>, <TABLE>, and so on. (See Listing 4.1 for an example.)

Enclosing the syntax text within angle brackets creates a tag or element. Close to the top of the web page's HTML markup source is the tag <HTML>. This tag tells the web browser that the page is coded in HTML; the web browser responds by displaying the information as directed by the rest of the tags on the page. At the bottom of the page is a similar tag, </HTML>. The slash after the opening angle bracket in the tag tells the browser that it has reached the end of the HTML page. The <HTML>tag is called an open tag, and the </HTML>tag is a close tag. The markup also contains other tag pairs: <HEAD>and </HEAD>, <TITLE> and </TITLE>, <BODY>and </BODY>. These tags define parts and functions of the HTML document.

Listing 4.1 Sample of HTML Markup

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Dynamiks Research Center News
Homepage</TITLE>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="keywords "content="press releases,
wind tunnels,aerospace".>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<TABLE width="100%"border="0" cellpadding="0"
cellspacing="0">
</TABLE>
</BODY>
</HTML>

The power of HTML is that it's very simple to use, as the HTML software excuses most obvious mistakes by human editors—unclosed tags, orphaned tags, mistyped tags—by always displaying something, not just a blank page. This leads to very complex HTML software, but ease of use for content creators. HTML has a fixed set of markup tags and most HTML software readily understands such commonly used tags. Because HTML is a standard more or less recognized by the browser manufacturers,⁴ millions of people and companies worldwide have found new and innovative ways of communicating over the web—and in many cases doing good business—without worrying about too many technical details....