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Computer technology update: deciphering XML: software vendors and even a few folks in the metals industry are saying Extensible Markup Language (XML) will eventually overtake Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) as the best tool for sharing data across the supply chain.

Article Excerpt
Over the past decade, many service centers have adopted EDI technology as a means of communicating electronically with suppliers and customers. Over the next decade, many will turn to XML instead--provided the industry can agree on the necessary standards.

According to the king of all media--Microsoft--XML is "a meta-markup language that ... allows developers to easily describe and deliver rich, structured data from any application in a standard, consistent way.

"XML is preferable to previous data formats because it can easily represent both tabular data (such as relational data from a database or spreadsheets) and semi-structured data (such as a Web page or business document). This [ability] has led to the widespread adoption of XML as the lingua franca of information interchange."

In XML, users can define an unlimited set of tags. An XML tag can tell a user whether the data is a customer name, a retail price, a size, a shipping address, or any other information. As companies across the Internet adopt these same tags, they increase their ability to search for and manipulate data.

Further, the language is independent of any platform, which makes it useful as a means for achieving interoperability between different programming platforms and operating systems.

Once an application locates XML data, the application can deliver the data over the network, present the data in a Web browser, or hand off the data to other applications for further processing and viewing, experts explain.

WHAT'S THE CATCH?

OK, so here's a language that can be used to communicate with everyone--mill suppliers, toll processors, freight haulers, customers. Of course, there's a catch: The metals industry hasn't yet defined its own standards for this wondertool.

One of the nation's steel associations established an XML Working Group four years ago to write the standards for steel. "The activity was suspended a couple years ago when the industry went through its restructuring process," a spokesman for the American Iron and Steel Institute says. "A lot of...

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