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Chapter 2: A Comprehensive Set of Standards
for Implementing XML Is Only Partially in
Place
• Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) provides
directories for Web services description and discovery. Using UDDI,
companies can discover each other and define how they will interact and
share information over the Internet.
In addition to business process standards, standard data vocabularies (or
languages) will be needed for particular industries, professions, and other
specific domains. Table 5 shows a representative sample of industry-
specific efforts. Hundreds of such projects have been registered with the
xml.org Web portal, which serves as a repository for industry XML
information.
Table 5: Representative Industry-Specific XML Vocabularies
Vocabulary name Description
Bioinformatic Sequence Markup Supports the encoding and display of DNA, RNA. and protein sequence information.
Language (BSML)
Chemical Markup Language (CML) Addresses needs of the chemical industry, such as data tags that can be used to
accurately represent chemical formulas.
Extensible Business Reporting Language Supports financial information, reporting, and analysis.
(XBRL)
Geography Markup Language (GML) Supports the transport and storage of geographic information, including both the geometry
and properties of geographic features
HR-XML Supports human capital management functions such as exchange of staffing data and
payroll transactions.
Legal XML (In development) Will support the legal and legislative profession, especially for electronic
court filings.
Mathematical Markup Language (W3C standard) Facilitates the use and re-use of mathematical and scientific content on
the Web.
OpenTravel Alliance (In development) Will provide a commonly accepted communications process for the travel
and transportation industry.
Spacecraft Markup Language (SML) Provides standard definitions of XML tags and concepts of structure to allow the definition
of spacecraft and other support data objects.
Wireless Markup Language (WML) Facilitates the specification of content and user interface for electronic devices such as
cellular phones and pagers.
Business Process Ideally, a well-defined set of XML business process standards covering all
key requirements of business data exchanges should be established and
Standards Are Less universally agreed upon. In conjunction with these basic business
Well-Developed than standards, individual industries would adopt standard vocabularies to
express their unique data types. If agreement on this overall set of
Technical Standards standards were achieved, systems developers would have the tools they
need to build systems that capitalize on XML’s potential to facilitate
interoperability. Without such a universally agreed-upon set of standards,
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