B2B standard targets integration

A standards effort that aims to do for business-to-business documents what the Dewey Decimal System does for library collections is gaining momentum.

The proposed standard is called Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF). Its charter is to simplify messaging among partners, suppliers and customers, and reduce the work required to build interfaces between systems.

The developers behind UDEF are trying to spread the word and attract standards bodies and users to their way of thinking. Although winning support for a new standard is never easy, UDEF has the backing of key standards players within Lockheed Martin and General Motors.

The problem UDEF is trying to solve is the lack of consistency among different electronic business document formats. Today there is no common way to identify the "semantic equivalency" of data elements contained in the various XML standards and back-office systems that communicate with each other, says John Hardin, chief architect for ebXML at GM.

For example, documents that adhere to standards such as Open Applications Group (OAG), CIDX for the chemical industry, Electronic Data Interchange and RosettaNet - as well as document formats supported by vendors such as Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP - might all contain the same data elements, but those elements are named differently, Hardin says.

"The same data element concept, such as 'purchase order document date,' has a different name in every single one of these formats," Hardin says. "So users have to create mapping code to bridge the gap and to match up these differently named but exactly alike data element concepts."

Relying on a person to match the data element concepts in each format and create translations for every systems connection is unsustainable. "When you think about Web services, you think about messages and transactions flying across the Web in an automated way," Hardin says. "We can't have a human in the middle of that process and get anything done with any speed."

Industry experts acknowledge the problem.

"If I structure my purchase order one way and you structure your purchase order a totally different way, even if we use the same terminology, a computer is not going to know that it's the same thing," says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at research firm ZapThink.

UDEF is aimed at addressing this translation gap with a rules-based naming convention.