Languages for electronic business communication: state of the art
| Pages | 217-227 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/02635570110394644 |
| Date | 01 July 2001 |
| Published date | 01 July 2001 |
| Author | Wilhelm Hasselbring,Hans Weigand |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
Languages for electronic business communication:
state of the art
Wilhelm Hasselbring
Infolab, Department of Information Management and Computer Science, Tilburg
University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Hans Weigand
Infolab, Department of Information Management and Computer Science, Tilburg
University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
1. Introduction
E-commerce is taking off on a global scale,
not only in the consumer market but
particularly in business-to-business (B2B)
application areas. However, there are also
many barriers that still need to be removed.
One barrier is the standardization of the
message formats and contents for business
communication. Although B2B e-commerce
has a longer tradition of electronic data
interchange in the form of EDIFACT, it is
generally observed that traditional EDI is too
costly and not flexible enough to cope with
the dynamics of the new economy
(Kimbrough and Lee, 1996; Kimbrough and
Moore, 1997; Meltzer and Glushko, 1998).
However, traditional EDI is often being re-
examined to define the meaning of the
transferred data (semantics), and XML is
employed as the practical foundation in
which to structure this information (syntax).
XML is a markup language for creating self-
descriptive data; in contrast to HTML, it
separates style and content and is extensible
in the sense that new tags can be used as long
as they are defined in the DTD (document
type definition). For e-commerce, it is
particularly interesting that one format can
be used both for electronic messages (to be
processed by computers) and for human
interfaces. An XML document itself is
already, to some extent, readable for humans
(which an EDI document usually is not), but
especially when it is accompanied by a style
document (XSL), it can be presented by
means of a Web browser in some desired
layout. This feature not only makes it
possible to have one single interface to
application systems (for humans and for
systems), but also enables hybrid set-ups in
which humans and systems are involved in
different stages of the business processes,
and the same format can be used throughout.
However, XML by itself will not do the job.
The receiving party can recognize something
as a valid XML document, and when it has
the accompanying document type definition
(DTD), it can check whether it adheres to this
DTD, but nothing is said yet about the
meaning of the data elements. If every
company were to develop its own DTDs, there
would be no real interoperability. Although
XML is technically superior to traditional
EDI formatting, it does not solve the huge
problem that EDI standardization has
worked on for years, namely, how to define
the contents of the messages. What elements
should be there, how are they represented
and what do they mean? If XML is to be used
in B2B e-commerce, something equivalent to
the EDIFACT standards must be in place.
For the exchange and automatic processing
of messages, a standardized language is
needed. This standardization can be at
different levels:
.at the lexical level of character sets (data
representation);
.at the syntactical level of message
structures; and
.at a deeper semantic level of vocabulary
and integrity constraints.
If communicating parties want true
communication, they must agree not only on
the form, but also on the meaning of the
messages. The agreement can be implicit or
explicit. Implicit means that the parties rely
on, for example, the ``common English
meaning'' of a lexical, whereas explicit
means that the lexicon has a precise formal
definition. If the message is to be processed
automatically, the meaning must be
formalized, although the formal definition
may or may not be explicit ± it can somehow
be incorporated in the code of
communication partners.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2
starts with a look at the background of
e-commerce. Sections 3 and 4 then
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[ 217 ]
Industrial Management &
Data Systems
101/5 [2001] 217±226
#MCB University Press
[ISSN 0263-5577]
Keywords
Electronic commerce,
Electronic data interchange,
Communications
Abstract
Electronic commerce (e-
commerce) is the new buzzword
for doing business on the Internet.
A main problem for business-to-
business e-commerce lies in the
need for the information systems
of the involved organizations to
exchange meaningful information.
For letting the information
systems of business partners
accomplish electronic business
communication, semantic
interoperability is necessary to
ensure that exchange of
information makes sense ± that
the provider and receiver of
information have a common
understanding of the ``meaning''of
the requested services and data.
Traditional EDI is not sufficient to
solve electronic business
communication problems in an
open and dynamic environment.
Summarizes the development from
traditional EDI towards new
advanced electronic business
communication approaches
offering agent-based e-commerce
marketplaces in which the
meaning of business messages is
managed by means of shared
repositories for formally specifying
the semantics of business
messages. Within this framework,
XML is the practical foundation for
structuring the information to be
interchanged.
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