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OAGIS: a `canonical'' business language: providing both vertical and horizontal requirements. (XML Labs).

Article Excerpt
It's been said that "the great thing about standards is ... there are so many to choose from." Each industry vertical today has its own consortium (for some there are several) that define the standards to be used within that particular industry vertical. In large industries these are broken up into consortia for the different areas. While XML was designed so that multiple data formats can be optimized for different data exchange applications, a problem arises when these different vertical groups define their own message for common business documents independent of one another. For example: request for quotes, purchase orders, invoices, to name a few.

It's natural for us humans to identify with those we are most like and to work with them on common problems. However, it's important for us not to lose sight of the fact that we must provide the information needed to conduct business in a terminology that the parties on each side of the transaction understand. This is true whether we're doing business between companies, within or outside our industry vertical, or up and down the supply chain.

Today what we see are point-to-point integrations by companies in each industry when they need to do business with a company in another industry (see Figure 1). By doing this companies create integrations that don't scale at all when communicating with other companies. Integrating companies in different vertical industries makes this picture worse, as the integrators don't often recognize common constructs because they have different names, structures, and/or naming conventions.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

A Horizontal Solution

While it's true that some aspects of a vertical industry are unique to that industry, there are common components and business documents that really are the same or similar. What's needed is a common horizontal language that can be used as a basis for these common components, and common business documents that these vertical industries can plug their additional content, constraints, and terminology into so as to pass information from business...

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