CommerceOne

Robert Glushko gave a presentation about CommerceOne, another effort for open and interoperable XML. He acknowledged there are many efforts to translate X12 or EDIFACT data to XML syntax, but these approaches are more radical, in his view. Glushko argued for the need to be able to express experimental or short term business relationships, rather than just permanent, point-to-point couplings. In his words, "Describe once, {buy, sell} anywhere." He compared and contrasted Rosettanet, OAG, OBI, etc.

After quoting Metcalfe's Law that "The value of a language depends on how many people [or computers] speak it," Glushko admitted that CommerceOne's Common Business Library (CBL) 1.x was brilliant but not particularly usable because it was too abstract and EDI replacement was not a goal. CBL 2.0, on the other hand, is far more practical, is schema based, and is concerned only with content, not transport. He sees CBL hopefully evolving into ebXML eventually.

CBL is available in three different schema languages:

• Microsoft's XML Data Reduced (XDR) (formerly XML Data)
• W3C's XML Schema Definition Language (XSDL)
• Commerce One's Schema for Object-Oriented XML (SOX)

Query Languages
What Happened at XML'99
XML/EDI: Issues, Ideas, Practical Constraints