Of Catalogs and Suppliers

An old adage states that 25% of what MIS departments do relates to catalogs. The U.S. government similarly has an ongoing need to get reliable, accurate, and timely information from its suppliers. Because of laws ensuring open competition on federal procurements, agencies have a particular need to get data from their smaller supplies . DLA's EMall seeks to build an online marketplace for the DLA. The original idea behind online marketplaces , called Netmarkets, is to create an electronic environment in which nimble buyers and sellers can move in and out, effortlessly exchanging information, with the ultimate goal of growing their businesses.

Obstacles arise from standardization and integration. Participants are faced with Netmarket vendors who rely on proprietary systems to ensure loyalty and adoption. If a business wants to participate in several Netmarkets, it needs to understand how to use its own business information each time.With Netmarkets, companies need to publish business information and data, dynamically update the content, and then integrate the data with various business flow applications. But when using more than one standard, joining the e-business train may seem like riding a roller -coaster. The government faces all these issues as it struggles to maintain a neutral and open front door for all its various and diverse suppliers, while at the same time reducing costs and increasing efficiency and ease of adoption.

Enterprises are now asking Netmarkets to provide features directly affecting catalog management, such as inter-exchange operability, robust collaboration, and demand forecasting. With the emerging adoption of ebXML as the standard for e-business, however, these demands may not be as daunting as they once seemed.

In addition, catalog information is not just about marketing products, but also about marrying the data into specific back-office requirements, such as accounting and inventory management. Enterprises are now asking Netmarkets to provide features directly affecting catalog management, such as interexchange operability, robust collaboration, and demand forecasting. With the emerging adoption of ebXML as the standard for e-business, however, these demands may not be as daunting as they once seemed.

For developers working with XML and catalog management logic, the ultimate goal is to create a solution that helps manage multiple kinds of catalogs, encourages real-time information exchange, promotes end-to-end transaction integration over the Internet, and provides complete interoperability with all back-office systems. Of course, this is not a new idea; EDI and a variety of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system vendor solutions have targeted these issues for years . Recently, the Open Applications Group (www.oagis.org) produced XML exchange formats, and its version 7.0 is now available. As a broad open standard, however, the OAG work is limited by its ERP's COBOL-esque heritage and backward compatibility needs.

The large Netmarket vendors have not been slow to address these areas. Corporations such as Ariba (cXML), Commerce One (xCBL), and others have developed their own proprietary XML-based vocabularies. These specific solutions may work in certain vertical industries served by a particular company. For cross-industry or inter-exchange communications, however, these unique vocabularies have limited interoperability. Therefore, DLA identified the need for this initial work to apply these concepts to produce an open, neutral XML catalog-exchange format, called CatXML .