Standards & Standardization
We are all witnessing the growth and impact of e-commerce
on business and on our everyday lives. Businesses and governments
are keen to deploy e-commerce technology for efficiency
improvement and cost savings. To fully benefit from e-commerce,
data and information must be shared and exchanged anytime
anywhere. Standards are critical to ensuring that diverse
information systems can interoperate within an organization
and across organizations. Two of CECID's mandates are to
participate in international standards development and to
adopt these standards in our R&D products.
Interoperability can be defined in three dimensions: data
exchange protocol, business data, and business process.
Organizations must develop agreements along these dimensions
with their partners in order to transact electronically,
and our R&D focuses on these dimensions.
Data Exchange Protocol Standards
Agreement on the data exchange protocol enables trading
partners to use a common way to transmit business data on
the Internet. Most of these recently developed protocol
standards are based on W3C
Simple Object Access Protocol. Different data exchange
protocols provide different quality of service capabilities.
A few protocols such as ebXML Message
Service offer some security and reliability features
that make data transmission on the Internet come very close
to lease line quality. Some new Web
Services standardization activities are also working
on adding similar features to the Web
Services basic profile.
Business Data Standards
Apart from the data exchange protocol, trading partners
must also agree upon the format, structure, and semantics
of the business data they communicate so that their computer
systems can understand and process the data unambiguously.
While XML is considered as the universal
format for data exchange on the Internet, W3C
XML Schema is commonly used to define XML data structure
and semantics.
To facilitate development of data standards, some organizations
have formulated their data standardization guidelines and
methodologies. UN/CEFACT, the e-commerce standards body
of the United Nations, has released the Core Components
Technical Specification (CCTS) under the ebXML framework
as a systematic approach for analyzing business information
and structure the information in electronic documents. Based
on CCTS, Universal Business Language (UBL)
is being developed in the OASIS Technical Committee. UBL
intends to become a legally recognized XML-based business
language standard for international trade. The Hong Kong
Government has also published its XML
Schema Design and Management Guide to set a methodology
standard for government agencies and software vendors to
design electronic documents and data standards for e-government
application.
Business Process Standards
Another crucial aspect for enterprises to collaborate electronically
is business process standardization. To automate business
transaction processing, information systems must follow
pre-agreed flows of business data exchange mechanisms within
an enterprise and among multiple trading partners. These
data exchange flows are usually prescribed in business process
specifications. RosettaNet has defined a rich library of
business process specifications called RosettaNet
Partner Interface Processes for business collaboration
in the high technology industry.
Several standards are being developed to support specification
of business processes in a way that software systems can
understand and execute the specifications. Business Process
Execution Language for Web Services (WSBEPL) and ebXML Business
Process Specification Schema (BPSS) are two rival standards
that take different approaches for analyzing and specifying
business processes. While BPSS is based on the choreography
approach, WSBPEL has adopted the orchestration approach.
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