xml-dev - Re: Babel (again) or standard taqs and aliases (UDEF, Bizcodes)

["W. E. Perry" <wperry@fiduciary.com>]

All of what you say is certainly true, but there is more to the story. The buzz
(dare one say frenzy? irrational exuberance?) which has attached to B2B stories
for the past year arises from the expectation that many more players than ever
before will be able to transact directly with each other. Some of these
newcomers will certainly be smaller enterprises which could not afford the
earlier EDI kit but which will now conform to a vertical industry XML-defined
data vocabulary in order to have a share in the business. Others, however, (and
some of them not small players!) will not see themselves as part of a particular
vertical market simply because they wish to consummate a particular transaction,
and may well be blithely unaware of the data vocabulary adopted by that
industry--indeed, perhaps even unaware of the boundaries of the vertical market
itself, as understood by its acknowledged participants. The possibility for such
players to bid or to offer, perhaps to the world in general, a transaction which
may not be couched in an agreed industry vocabulary and may not even be bounded
by the accepted definition of an industry, opens possibilities for the expansion
of commerce far beyond what will ever result from smaller new players conforming
to the norms of an industry which has a vital interest in seeing to it that they
do not take away any significant market share.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry

KenNorth wrote:

> Doing B2B according to prescribed forms has been the status quo among large
> companies and their suppliers for a couple of decades. It's history, not a
> practice being introduced by ebXML and BizTalk. Long before the W3C released
> the XML spec, the largest corporations defined B2B standards and transaction
> sets used by their trading partners. Something like 95% of the Global 1000
> use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems.
>
> Because EDI isn't cheap, trading groups consist of partners who can afford
> the technology and the infrastructure it requires. The cost has been a
> barrier to entry for smaller companies. That's been one of the motivations
> behind initiatives such as ebXML and BizTalk. The technology at the core of
> those efforts (XML and the Internet) enables a smaller player to
> participate.


***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@xml.org&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************