XML — The Extensible Markup Language and its Use in the Field of EDI

This contribution introduced the reader to fundamental XML technologies such as XML and DTDs. In many application scenarios XML plays a major role when designing modern information systems. XML is supported by all major software vendors and it can be used with a variety of languages on almost every computer platform, which further facilitates XML’s suitability for many different applications. One of those a applications is the field of EDI where, among other things, XML has been adopted to structure business documents such as invoices and purchase orders. Nevertheless, XML is no magic bullet because the problem of different coexisting formats is still unsolved. Similar to traditional EDI, with XML there is the need for conversions and transformations between different formats. This issue was a main focus of this contribution. We showed what problems might occur when XML business documents have to be transformed into other formats and how to solve these problems with XSLT. At the end we introduced the <x:act> Web service as a means for carrying out such conversions in a platform- and language-neutral manner.