XML Key Technology For The Economy

XMLKey Technology For The Economy

Dieter W. StorrJuly 2001

Dieter W. Storr 24 August 2001 2

XML - The Key Technology For The Economy

DTDSGML

XML

XQL

XSL

HTMLW3C

WAP

WML

XHTMLB2B

EDI

e-businessm-business

s-business



Why Not EDI?Why Using The Web?SPEED, The Benefit of XMLType of e-BusinessDo we need e-Business?Differences Between HTML and XML



XML DTD, schemaXLS Style SheetsXML DatabasesXML Application IntegrationXML UsersLiterature



Internet: Internet: The fastest growing The fastest growing communications communications medium in historymedium in history

> 400 million users / 25 million in Germany> 400 million users / 25 million in Germany> 4 billion Web pages> 4 billion Web pages> $28 billion online retail revenues in U.S. in 2000> $28 billion online retail revenues in U.S. in 2000



The Internet is changing business much faster and more far-reaching ways than even the most optimistic technology pundits could have predicted.

The potential for drastically cutting costs by conducting business via the Web is enormous.

More and more companies plan to handle purchasing, distribution and logistics via the Internet.

Analysts estimate a much higher growth potential for the Internet in the business-to-business sector than in the consumer market.

Source: The XML Shockwave, Berthold Daum, Chris Horak



XML is a standard developed by the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

XML has the power to become the most important Web standard.

XML is rapidly evolving as the key enabler for the new online economy of e-business (electronic business), m-business (mobile business), or s-business (silent business between computers).

XML is the most radical change in computing since the invention of relational databases and SQL.



Why not Electronic Data Interchange (EDI/EDIFACT) instead of Internet?

EDI was used to electrify existing trade relationships. The Internet is an existing marketplace where new

business contacts and new trade relationships can be established.

EDI requires networks that are carefully planned and implemented in advance.

The Internet develops in an unplanned way driven by the autonomous activities of millions of users.

The global IP network:The global IP network:

Open standards worldwideOpen standards worldwide



Why Internet and not Electronic Data Interchange (EDI/EDIFACT) instead?

The traditional supply chain applications based on EDI are difficult and expensive to implement and to maintain.

EDI works best with long-term relationships between client and supplier and with a small number of partners.

EDI doesn’t work at all with complex supply networks or open markets. Only 2% of US companies use EDI for supply chain management.


XML Content

BusinessProcesses

Sales Automation

CRM

ERP

System,network &

Telecoms mgt Logistics

Budget &Planning

HRMS

Collaboration& KM

Travel

Intelligent Information Integration Strategy Exposes Processes and Content for Speedy Evolution



SPEED: The benefits of XML

SPEED

toring

ublishing and

xchanging

lectronic

ocuments



Buzzword STORAGE: Today’s DB technology is not capable of dealing with

electronic business information such as documents, pix, sounds, retina images, digital signatures, etc.

RDBMSs ‘flatten’ the world of data into two-dimensional structures called tables.

RDBMSs requires fragmenting the document. The internal structure is lost.

When retrieving the document it must be restructured.



Buzzword STORAGE: Fortunately, XML offers a way out. Some vendors are building native XML databases

that allow you to store your electronic business information directly in a new kind of filing system.

Enterprises can store, retrieve, manage, search, and distribute their electronic business information from a single source.

Enterprises can build an XML ‘staging area’ for their corporate DMBS infrastructure



Buzzword PUBLISHING: Publishing really took off about 600 years ago

when Gutenberg invented the hot metal letter printing. This innovation enabled a number of cultural revolutions in Europe, for example Renaissance, French Revolution.

With XML some are seeing another revolution in publishing: ‘push button publishing’

XML documents can be automatically reformatted for various devices by using ‘style sheets’



Buzzword PUBLISHING: The standard that is being developed underneath

of the XML umbrella is called the eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)

Influence the look and feel of the information Control what information is being published XML will evolve the field of publishing from

Gutenberg’s ‘reusable type’ to ‘reusable documents’



Buzzword ELECTRONIC: Web publishers are bombarding the market daily

with e-mail, e-zines, newspapers, and books that speak about e-Business e-Commerce e-Government e-Conomy

Pundits and laymen alike want you to believe that if you don’t move to “E”, you will have an e-Mergency

e-Nough



Buzzword ELECTRONIC: Electronic in the context of electronic business

means the “complete automation of a business transaction across

organization boudaries”. The most important aspect of electronic business

is “the ability for machines to speak to machines”



Buzzword EXCHANGE: Up to now, the average CEO and CIO have been

thinking of their information technology (IT) as something that concerns their corporation on a internal level.

Now, it is becoming just as important to integrate the supply chain of your company with the ordering systems of your supply chain partners.

The expensive enterprise resource planning system (ERP) you installed is simply not geared up for this challenge.



Buzzword EXCHANGE: And the fancy Web shops you can buy from the

dime-a-dozen Silicon Valley DOT COMS won’t get you there either. They are simply not sophisticated enough for the task of automated communication.

Here are some examples of information exchange: warehouse shelves talking to restocking systems factory assembly lines talking to parts manufacturers of

databases power plants talking to emergency response systems



Buzzword DOCUMENTS: What is the difference between the existing HTML

documents and XML documents? The query stock quote yahooentered at lycos.com, resulted in approx. 150,000 hits.

XML documents structure information entities into separate elements that are nicely labeled with tags. An XML query can be much mores specific:stock_qoute[ company=“yahoo”]



What type of electronic business?

B2C: Business-to-ConsumerIncludes online shops, and also includes sales channels to content-related sites, online banking and other financial services.

Example:A joint venture between IBM and Deutsche Post (German postal service) provides a complete e-commerce solution for small business.Or BP’s virtual gas station bpexpress.de




B2B: Business-to-BusinessIncludes all kind of transactions between commercial enterprises such as procurement, and supply and demand chains but also includes activities such as support, training, electronic newsletters, etc.



0100200300400500600700800900

10001100120013001400

1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

B2CB2B

Amount in billions US $ US e-Commerce 1998-2003

Source: Forester Research




B2A: Business-to-AdministrationIncludes transactions between businesses and government institutions or industry associations such as economic and environmental monitoring, tax, insurance, etc.




C2A: Consumer-to-AdministrationIs still in an embryonic state but offers also big potential: schools and libraries go online, car registration, tax declaration, and welfare payments become possible over the Internet, etc.Example:

State of Alaska introduced car registration over the Internet



Does my business need an electronic business?(Does my business need a telephone?)

Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum:

“I see two resolutions, which are interrelated: the first is the e-revolution, the second is globalization. To survive, each business must answer the question: How do I become global?”



HTM LHypertext M arkup Language

XMLeXtensible M arkup Language

1 9 9 8

SGMLStandard G eneralized M arkup Language

5 0 0 p ag es s tan d ard s



XML Basics

<Address> <Name> <FirstName> Dieter </FirstName> <LastName> Storr </LastName> </Name> <Phone> <business> 3105778042 </business> <home> 7142569594 </home> </Phone></Address>



Record in a relational database

Dieter,Storr,3105778042,7142569594

Problem?

What is first name, last name, home phone, etc.?



Example for incorrect data exchange:On September 23, 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter vanished behind Mars. The Software module ‘Small Forces’ in the ground control station used English units while the shuttle assumed metric units.



Document Type Definition (DTD)

Describes the syntax of a document,for example the vocabulary and its structure

Disadvantage:Content enclosed in tags is treated just as plain text with no semantic constraints whatsoever



XML Schema (new W3C recommendation)

Limited description of document semantics, for example <height> must be a floating point number between 1.0 and 20.0.

XML Schema will replace the current XML DTDMicrosoft’s BizTalk already uses XML Schema as a specification language



XML Schema (new W3C recommendation)

Not yet possible:Semantic relationships between elements, for example the product width*height*depth must be within defined limits.

Another problem:The element <volume> could be evoke numerous associations: dimensions, decibels, and dictionaries



Standards for Document Type Definition (DTD)Tag sets, for example

Health care institutesHealth level 7 (HL7)

Newspaper Association of AmericaClassified advertisements

UNICODE For international languages (Computer Esperanto)



Database Developments:

1960/1970: DBMS

Early 1980: RDBMS

1990s: ODBMS

2000 (started 1998) XML DB



In te rne t W A P PD A V O IC E

S tyle S he e tX S L

< nam e> D ie te r < /na m e>

D a ta ba seD BM S / RD BM S / O D BM S




S tyle S he e tX S L

< nam e> D ie te r < /na m e>

X M L D ata ba seD T D / X M L S chem a




S tyle S heetX S L

X M L D atabaseD T D / X M L S chem a

D atabases and T ex tD BM S / RD BM S / O D BM S / W ord T ex t / O thers



XML Databases

XML database technology did not replace the existing transaction systems on the mainframe, but established a new, separate growth market for SQL databases.

XML is having a major impact on the vendors of SQL databases, as more and more customers are demanding they comply with this much more open and easy to use XML standards.



XML Databases

SQL vendors have to completely re-engineer their kernel or build a completely new system to store, retrieve and manage XML information natively and with high performance.

XML and the Web by nature require a hierarchical view of information that is notoriously difficult to map into traditional database systems.



Mapped XML Databases

Several vendors have announced or released XML-enabled versions of their relational or object-oriented DBMS products.

All of these products feature a kernel architecture that is not optimized for XML queries and information retrieval.

First benchmarks show that native XML databases perform about one order of a magnitude faster than mapped XML databases.



Native XML Databases

Only one vendor delivers a completely new, native implementation of an XML database called Tamino.

The product features two main components,

one for the storage of Internet information, and the other for the access of remote enterprise data.



XML Application Integration Since the late 1990s, the application integration

has been booming, for example packaged applications.

It became clear that there were massive integration gaps between the old and the new application environments.

These gaps needed to be filled with connectivity products, often referred as middleware or enterprise application integration products.



XML Application Integration Component standards like CORBA, COM, and EJB

evolved in the labs of Microsoft, IBM, Sun and others improved the former problems that customers experienced with proprietary programming interfaces.

These standards do not enable the description of content and structure of the information being exchanged between the applications.



XML Application Integration

Application integration vendors that do not support XML internally and at the interface level will quickly be left behind in this rapidly evolving market.

Internet devices:Internet devices:

Single-purpose devicesSingle-purpose devices

Documents

XML Key Technology For The Economy