The XML esperanto or Tower of Babel: do we speak the same XML?

Modern business relationships demand interoperability of various e-commerce applications using standardized protocols and formats for data interchange. A key factor for establishing seamless communication among enterprises is a common business vocabulary. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is one of the most promising standards for defining and naming data. XML is a Meta Language that allows each user to define the structure of the data relevant for a particular problem domain. However, XML is still an immature technology, which leads to problems regarding its deployment. We still do not have global agreement on the semantics and therefore each industry vertical has its own XML specification. The paper presents our approach to resolving the issue of heterogeneous XML semantics. We propose an object oriented approach and the use of standard libraries, which should present a common basis on which each new XML specification should be built.