A standard can be defined as a set of agreed rules and guidelines for common and repeated use for a particular, pre-defined purpose. In terms of trade facilitation, standards are of the utmost importance and the development of semantic and syntactical data standards (EDI), over the past twenty years, has greatly enhanced inter-organisational communication and supply chain efficiency.

Standards for EDI have been continuously maintained and developed at both national and international levels, through committees comprising members from varying industry sectors. By utilising these established, commonly understood sets of data and data transfer standards organisations have achieved a large degree of inter-operability. However, EDI has not reached critical mass of user uptake, the main reasons given for this are that traditional EDI is too expensive and complex for organisations to implement, especially in the case of SMEs.

The advent of XML presents great opportunities for improved inter-operability at reduced costs. It is important, however, to harness the vast body of knowledge and experience, in the naming and defining of business data, from the EDI standards development community and combine this with the technological experience from the vendor community. To this end, the ebXML initiative was a joint effort between these two communities with the vision of producing a commonly understood, agreed set of methodologies for both modelling business processes and deriving the necessary data for transactions over existing and future platforms. The initiative has delivered a set of specifications, technical reports and working documents.

Why does XML need standards?

Many organisations and individuals have said that XML will enable many of the aspirations that traditional EDI standards have never managed. There is some merit in this view but it needs to be tempered by the realisation that the world is a vastly different place from 20 years ago when EDI was first being implemented. Today implementation trends are strongly influenced by software vendors who in turn are competing with each other and technological trends to establish market share. What is clear is that XML has become the preferred technology upon which the worlds leading vendors are basing their B2B hopes. Perhaps one reason for this trend is the fact that XML is platform and software independent and can therefor effectively be used to "glue" together applications and exchanges accross the value chain.

Opinions differ, certainly if UN/EDIFACT had been embraced to the same extent to which XML has been today then the aspirations for traditional EDI would have been fair more realistic. But in truth XML has more technological breadth than traditional EDI. In fact XML is really a generic name which actually covers many technologies and applications, not just B2B exchanges. These technologies actually go hand-in-hand with one another, which means that for software vendors applications can be more modular when based on XML. So where does this leave standards?

Groups have been working on XML/EDI hybrid standards, taking the semantic heritage of EDI and placing it in XML syntax. The problem with this approach is that is that it neither levers the maximum advantages of XML nor overcomes many of the disadvantages associated with traditional EDI. The future of XML in the context of B2B exchanges is to learn from traditional EDI, base syntax instantiations on well formed business process models and manage XML flexibility to better enable interoperability. So why should vendors care?

Vendors care greatly about B2B standards because their customers are demanding solutions that will overcome the current difficulties associated with business exchanges between software systems, organisations and across geographical boundaries. Vendors now realise that there is more to be gained through interoperability, than locking customers into a proprietary solutions. To achieve this vendors have begun to work together, facilitated by standards bodies and in unison with business experts to define global XML standards like electronic business XML.

Without any form of standardisation the flexibility of XML will become the biggest single obstacle to implementation within the B2B domain. Flexibility must be managed in a manner, which will enable re-usability and facilitate harmonisation. Without this each non-standard XML dialect will not openly and cost effectively communicate beyond the boundaries of its own implementation domain. The benefits of XML will then only be realised by users who are dominant within their value chains.