Elsevier

Computers in Industry

Volumes 92–93, November 2017, Pages 118-136
Computers in Industry

XML interoperability standards for seamless communication: An analysis of industry-neutral and domain-specific initiatives

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2017.06.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Analysis of current XML industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives towards seamless communication, discussing challenges and highlighting directions for further research and development work.

  • By comparing these initiatives, a set of recommendations is advanced towards improving further interoperability developments, offering a unique niche for researchers, practitioners and developers to make significant contributions.

Abstract

Attaining seamless interoperability among heterogeneous communication systems and technologies remains a great challenge in todays’ networked world. Real time information exchange among heterogeneous and geographically distributed systems is required to support the execution of complex e-business scenarios supported by cross-organizational business processes. XML emerged as a foundation for performing e-business, receiving an increasing adoption in the new market economies. Several interoperability standards emerged, which provide specifications on performing business-to-business e-business, what information to share, when and how. The aim of this article is to present an up-to-date review of current XML-based industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives towards seamless communication, discussing their commonalities and differences, and highlighting directions for further research and development work. An overview of the main standards’ elements is also made, analyzing how different initiatives address them.

As numerous standardization initiatives are quickly emerging and changing, it is not easy to understand them. By analyzing the most commonly referred XML-based standards for interoperability, this article has two main contributions. First, it provides an up-to-date review of the most relevant industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives aiming at achieving seamless interoperability among communication systems. Second, by comparing these initiatives, a set of recommendations is advanced towards improving further interoperability developments, offering a unique niche for researchers, practitioners and developers to make significant contributions.

Introduction

In today’s dynamic networked environment, organizations strongly depend on information and communication technologies (ICTs) to exchange information and to support the execution and management of their core activities and cross-organization business processes. Similarly, the success of joint collaborative military operations relays on the exchange of critical information in real-time. As a consequence, ensuring interoperability among heterogeneous and geographically distributed systems has become of utmost importance.

Interoperability, in a broad sense, refers to the use of computer-based tools that facilitate the coordination of work and information flow among heterogeneous distributed communication systems. According to IEEE [1], interoperability represents the capability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and use it. It emerged from the need to harmonize the operational heterogeneous networked environment, real-time information sharing and the necessity to improve task coordination [2].

Enterprise interoperability, integration and networking represent major areas that enable companies to improve communication and collaboration [3]. Different data formats were developed (e.g., EDI, XML) to support information systems’ interoperability. The focus of this article is on business-to-business (B2B) XML-based e-business interoperability standardization initiatives or frameworks,1 simply referred here as XML-based interoperability standards.2 This decision was made because XML is highly adopted by the computer industry and the B2B e-business standards widely used in industry follow XML-based specifications.

XML (Extensible Markup Language, www.w3.org/XML/) was developed by the WWW Consortium (W3C). It represents a meta-language for e-documents management and web publishing and also a data format [21]. Its flexible data format derived from the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML, https://www.iso.org/standard/16387.html) ISO 8879. XML has numerous advantages3,4 compared to other approaches: it supports the validation of a DTD document (i.e., unlike YAML), it is machine readable and also human readable,5 it supports references (XPointer, XPath), allows many views on the one data (i.e., unlike JSON), allows integration on all traditional databases and formats, it is document-oriented, and is widely adopted by the computer industry (i.e., unlike JSON), and XML continues to be the format of choice for API developers (DOM, SAX, XQuery, XPath) – especially in the absence of well-defined standards. The SOAP and XML-RPC protocols rely on XML (i.e., to accept requests, to provide data in their responses).

Numerous XML-based standardization approaches towards seamless interoperability exist: industry-neutral initiatives (such as: ebXML http://www.ebxml.org or RosettaNet www.rosettanet.org), and domain-specific initiatives, such as: HL7 (Health Level Seven http://www.hl7.org) in the healthcare sector, papiNet (www.papinet.org) for the paper and forest products industry, or NATO STANAGs for unmanned aerial vehicles [4].

Despite the variety of reference architectures, frameworks, tools, infrastructures and technologies supporting (or claiming to support) seamless interoperability, the scientific community emphasizes this objective is not yet fully achieved and more work needs to be done [5], [4], [6].

Most articles addressing interoperability in the context of e-business focus on e-business frameworks, e.g., [7], [8], [9], [2], [10], [3] are descriptive in nature. In several cases the actual use in practice of the respective framework is not addressed (e.g., [10]). The coverage of interoperability requirements is not analyzed. Domain-specific standardization initiatives receive little attention [41], although numerous advances were made. In order to attain seamless interoperability in today’s networked economy, when accurate real-time information exchange is crucial for successful businesses, and spans different organizations from different industries, it is important to understand the specificities of each domain specific approach. Recent works, although aiming to review e-business interoperability frameworks [10], did not actually tackle domain-specific interoperability frameworks. Other works focus on a specific case study [11], or implementations following a certain standard specifications, as in: [12], [13]. An up-to-date review or analysis of current advances of domain-specific initiatives for seamless communication is not available, although highly relevant. This article addresses this gap.

The objective of this article is to present an up-to-date review of the most relevant XML-based e-business industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives aiming at achieving seamless interoperability, discussing their commonalities and differences, and highlighting directions for further research and development work. By performing this analysis, this article has two main contributions. First, it provides an up-to-date review of the most relevant industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives towards seamless interoperability among communication systems. Second, by comparing these initiatives, a set of recommendations is advanced towards improving further interoperability developments, offering a unique niche for researchers, practitioners and developers to make significant contributions.

This article is organized as follows. The following section discusses related work. Section 3 briefly introduces relevant aspects on interoperability. Main standardization initiatives are presented next. Section 5 contains a comparative analysis and discussion of the results. The article concludes with a section addressing the need for further research.

Section snippets

Related work

Related research efforts were analyzed. A brief overview of the most relevant works is presented in this section.

A comparative analysis of five business-to-business frameworks (eCo, BizTalk, OBI, cXML, RosettaNet) concerning security, communication protocols, service discovery, repositories, message format, query mechanism, scalability and ontology aspects is presented in [14]. A special focus, however, is on security issues related to enterprise business transactions over the Internet. An

Background

Interoperability reflects the capability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and use in a heterogeneous network the information that was exchanged [25]. In the military domain, interoperability refers to the ability of different military organizations to conduct joint operations, allowing forces, units or systems to operate together [26]. Interoperability solutions enable ICT systems to facilitate information exchange and promote service compatibility between systems

Standardization bodies and initiatives

Numerous standardization bodies and consortia exist, promoting industry-neutral or industry-specific interoperability standardization initiatives. Consortia are usually alliances of convenience where different organizations (e.g., vendors, developers) team up to solve specific problems and share best practices. Very often consortia have enough critical mass behind an emerging standard, promoting its adoption. The most relevant standardization bodies and initiatives are briefly referred below,

Comparative analysis and discussion

Table 2, Table 3 contain an overview of the main characteristics of the industry-neutral initiatives (Table 2) and domain-specific standardization initiatives (Table 3) illustrating the promoting organization, aim of the initiative, and the main elements of the framework/standard.

As reflected in Table 2, most industry-neutral standardization initiatives are quite mature initiatives. ebXML and RosettaNet provide detailed specifications for the messaging service and business processes. In

Conclusions and directions for future work

This paper presents an overview and analysis of relevant industry-neutral and industry-specific standardization initiatives. The comparative analysis performed showed that all the industry-specific initiatives analyzed tackle technical and knowledge/information interoperability. Semantic interoperability is ensured by a common set of business documents (e.g., TexWeave) or by a common dictionary/glossary (e.g., PIDX, AgXML). ebXML and RosettaNet, as industry-neutral approaches for seamless

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions for improvement that allowed to enhance this article.

Claudia-Melania Chituc is an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), The Netherlands. Prior to joining the TU/e, she was an assistant professor at the Informatics Engineering Department of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (UPorto), Portugal, where she was the PI for UPorto for the ENSURE FP7 project. She holds a PhD and a MSc in Computers and Electrical Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal, and two

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    Claudia-Melania Chituc is an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), The Netherlands. Prior to joining the TU/e, she was an assistant professor at the Informatics Engineering Department of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (UPorto), Portugal, where she was the PI for UPorto for the ENSURE FP7 project. She holds a PhD and a MSc in Computers and Electrical Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal, and two licentiate degrees she pursued simultaneously at two different universities: in computer science and engineering (from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania) and in economics -being specialized in finances, insurances, banks and stock exchange (from the Academy of Economic Studies Bucharest, Romania).

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