XML for Business to Business Data Exchange

This paper examines to use of XML for business to business data exchange. Starting with creating an XML document from an existing data source and transmitting that document, we explain some of the supporting standards for XML which facilitate automated processing and transformation of an XML document. Finally we look at the advantages of using XML, and why it is expected to revolutionise electronic data interchange. Introduction to XML The Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is a subset of SGML, was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to provide a freely available, widely transportable methodology for controlled data interchange. XML was designed principally for the exchange of information in the form of computer documents over the Internet.[4], [7]. An XML document contains data, and tags which describe that data. The tags are syntactically similar to HTML tags, however unlike HTML, XML tags are not pre-defined. When creating a document, you decide what tags are required in a document, and what each tag will be called. This allows an XML document structure to mirror the equivalent business documents. Figure 1: XML Document. 14 May 1999 Joe Bloggs Dublin 1 Elicon 250g 1 Figure 1: XML Document medical prescription 7 HTML, the language currently used to create web pages, is also a subset of SGML.