Chapter 9. Moving from Theory to Practice

This chapter presents actual applications of ebXML principles to solve business requirements. The two applications presented here are available online as previews of anticipated ebXML-capable systems.

The first application distributes product catalog information to help small suppliers easily deploy their own online catalogs and then have an XML-enabled point of presence from which other ebXML-capable systems can directly query to retrieve stock availability and pricing information.

The second application offers a business semantic registry that relates to this catalog system. The registry is designed to provide metadata (descriptive data about the data) on the business information in the catalog. For instance, a list price of an item in the catalog is a decimal number, but what does that list price itself mean in business terms? Is it expressed in U.S. dollars? Is it a retail price, or a discounted price, is it tax paid or not? Querying the registry allows business partners to discover the answers to these questions and more.

The two applications are therefore coupled together to solve the overall business requirements and expressed as an ebXML-based solution. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) funded the original CatXML work (www.catxml.org) as part of an initiative called EMall, funded by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), and the follow-on registry implementation (http://nist.xmlglobal.com) was funded by the National Institute of Standards (NIST) as part of that agency's metadata registry interoperability research (see www.nist.gov).