DETROIT - The promise of the giant Chinese auto market has spurred carmakers worldwide to rally around a new standard for data exchange that they say is needed to exploit the opportunity.

Announced at last week's Auto-Tech Conference in Detroit by European, Japanese and U.S. standards bodies, the Joint Automotive Data Model (JADM) is designed to provide a common way for manufacturers and suppliers to swap XML-formatted data. The format-neutral XML is widely viewed as far more flexible for Internet-based machine-to-machine data sharing than the decades-old electronic data interchange (EDI).

The JADM effort is intended to preempt development of company- and region-specific formats that - as with EDI - could prove incompatible and costly to support.

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"China wants common international standards because they're dealing worldwide," said Sherman Adams, a former GM executive active in the company's joint-ventures operations in Shanghai and now a member of consultancy China Solutions.

The market for cars in China grew by 14% last year to about 5 million vehicles, according to figures cited at the conference. The number of cars sold annually in China, now the second-largest country in terms of paved roads, will likely equal that of cars sold in North America by 2013, show speakers said.

Chinese factories are increasingly automated but e-commerce exchange with partners for orders, deliveries and shipment information is just beginning, and is made difficult by the sometimes poor quality of Chinese T-1 lines, Internet service and huge amounts of computer viruses, Adams said.

The collaboration by the standards groups - Japan's Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, Europe's Odette and the Standards for Technology in Retail organization in the U.S - is seen as an important initiative to lift the world from its business-to-business Tower of Babel. "Today, we signed a memo of understanding on how we express process design and how we express XML schema and formats we'll use," said Yoshikazu Shiozawa, IT manager at Japan's Toyota.

"It's a great step forward for global interoperability," said Richard Malaise, CIO at the Reston, Va., National Automobile Dealers' Association. "We'll have an end-to-end repository for supply-to-retail definitions of business process."