XML is rapidly emerging as a universal format for company and industry-wide sharing and retrieval of information and efficient publishing to multiple users, among other applications. What are the business benefits of XML, and what computing infrastructure will help your company take full advantage of XML?

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is emerging as a powerful data exchange mechanism for business publishing and information sharing on the web and in corporate business applications. XML is a key enabling technology not only for information reuse within the corporation, but for business-to-business commerce over the Internet and corporate intranets.

HTML spurred the growth of the World Wide Web by providing a universal format for the appearance of web documents. XML goes beyond HTML by providing a universal mechanism for representing structured data such as database records, spreadsheets and compound documents. XML benefits include:

Data sharing. Using XML and industry-defined Document Type Definitions (DTDs), companies can exchange information without the need for converting between incompatible file formats.

Information management and knowledge discovery. XML makes it easy to develop customized views of enterprise data and find data within complex sets of documents.

Web publishing. XML helps web publishers efficiently publish different versions for different users depending on the user’s interests, PC capabilities and network connection.

XML works best in a balanced computing architecture containing a mix of robust servers and powerful clients. Well-constructed XML solutions take advantage of client power to offload many compute-intensive aspects of XML processing and minimize the bandwidth demands on corporate networks. Platforms based on the Intel¨ Pentium II and Pentium II Xeon processors offer outstanding price/performance for XML processing on both the client and the server side.

Addressing a Wide Range of Issues

Businesses spend millions of dollars and countless hours wrestling with the problem of incompatible data formats.

Users grow frustrated with web searches that return hundreds or even thousands of found items and can’t distinguish the Egyptian monuments from the multi-level marketing scheme.

These two very different problems share a common solution: the Extensible Markup Language (XML), a specification developed by the group charged with overseeing the evolution of the web -- the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Industry experts and major technology companies alike are praising XML as a standard that will transform the web over the next one to three years. According to Marty Tenenbaum, Chairman of CommerceNet and longtime advocate for online commerce (speaking in Time Magazine, Nov. 10, 1997), XML offers "the real possibility of fundamentally restructuring the way a given industry works."

Work on XML began in July, 1996, and it was accepted as a standard by the W3C in February, 1998. Today, numerous industry leaders have announced plans to incorporate XML into existing products, XML-based applications and tools are coming to market, and forward-thinking businesses are exploring and implementing ways to use XML to solve their information management problems. By late 1999, XML tools are expected to be integrated into many leading applications, and in 2000, many observers anticipate that XML will be broadly deployed throughout the industry.

This white paper provides an overview of XML, including why XML is finding such broad support and how businesses can benefit from XML. It also discusses software and hardware considerations for businesses deploying XML-based applications.

Reusing Information, Searching Intelligently

"[XML] will make searching, reusing and exchanging electronic content much easier, enabling more efficient electronic commerce, content management and mission critical publishing solutions." Sharon Grimshaw, Director, Enterprise Software Div., Adobe Systems Inc.*

The business world is awash in data, but turning it into useful and actionable information is easier said than done. Part of the problem is that a massive amount of business information is stored in proprietary formats. One Fortune 500 company did an internal survey and found it uses more than 150 distinct formats for storing information. Data interchange solutions that aim to convert between disparate file formats are expensive and time consuming at best, and may result in loss of information. As a result, when two departments -- let alone two companies -- want to access similar information and put it to a different use, they find it difficult to repurpose the data. For example, if a company’s manufacturing department stores process specifications in one format and the marketing department wants to use this information to produce some product literature, they first have to convert Manufacturing’s data to the format Marketing uses.

Searching for specific information in a large document database presents another set of difficulties, because documents aren’t tagged or coded to assist users in finding specific pieces of information. For example, if you’re looking for a particular graph that’s a component of a document, you must manually browse through a large set of documents instead of being able to quickly identify documents that contain this graph.

XML provides solutions to these problems and enables a number of other capabilities.

XML: Delivery of Structured Data

XML is a meta--language for representing structured data. A meta--language is a language for creating other languages -- in this case, languages that specify how to represent structured data. Structured data typically is complex, hierarchical data that has sets of rules describing how the data is organized. Examples of structured data are compound documents, database records, and spreadsheet data; images, video and audio files are unstructured data.

XML is a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), an international standard and a much broader and more complex meta--language. SGML has been used extensively for over a decade in the professional publishing community for dealing with large, complex, formatted documents. Where the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) governs the way data is formatted for presentation on the web, SGML and XML provide a framework for determining how structured data is represented. By allowing documents to describe their content and its structure, XML provides a standard way of representing hierarchical data. For example, an XML document that contains molecular data may have a set of rules that describes how molecules can be assembled. An XML viewer will use these rules to correctly display the molecular data stored in the file.

XML separates content from its presentation. In HTML, for example, information that describes the presentation of textual data (e.g., a markup tag like bold) is not separated from actual textual data. This means that applications interested in just the textual data must take additional steps to extract this information from the HTML file. It also means that an HTML file is "displayed" in only one pre--specified way on every output device (e.g., computer screen or printer) and for every user. In XML, tags can be applied to various portions of a document to structure information. For example, all text that relates to a certain author can be tagged, which makes it easier to find and view information relating to that author, and to format the data differently for different audiences.

Business Applications of XML

"Doing business on the Net is hard because the underlying software is so dumb. XML will fix that." -- Time Magazine, November 10, 1997

While XML lends itself to a wide range of uses, three of the most promising are in the areas of data sharing, knowledge management and web publishing.

Data Sharing

Since XML documents contain information about their content, they can be used as an universal format for storing data, and their content can be easily repurposed without the need to convert the file to another format. If a manufacturing department’s process specs are stored in an XML file, the marketing department can reuse this data in marketing collateral. The cumulative effect is that knowledge is managed more efficiently, and deployed throughout the enterprise more rapidly, because companies don’t waste time converting between file formats.

Through the creation of industry--agreed--upon Document Type Definitions (DTDs), XML documents can also represent industry data in a standard way. In the past, when businesses exchange information, they’ve often had to convert between file formats or agree to use the same applications or tools to create the information to be shared. Now, instead of just creating another file format, companies can create XML documents to store data and can exchange files between corporations, without the need for file conversions.

For example, 3Com uses XML to share customer and inventory information on the web between 3Com and its resellers, Insight and CDW. XML is used to transfer customer orders from the 3Com site to a reseller without the customer having to re--enter their information. In the future, they plan to expand the capability by including real--time inventorying and relaying of basic sales information from the reseller site back to 3Com. This makes the customers visit to the 3Com web site more productive, and allows 3Com to get valuable sales information back from their resellers.

"If you have a real--world problem that you can solve, you can solve it with XML. It is possible to deploy solutions today using XML, " says Fergus O’Reilly, manager of I--commerce software development at 3Com (quoted in InfoWorld, Sept. 21, 1998).

Published: February 26, 1999

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