October 5, 2008
Vertical market XML standards
Tracking the alphabet soup of vertical market XML standards is hard. So as a starting point, I’m splitting a list I got from IBM into a standalone post.
Among the most important or successful IBM pureXML–supported standards, in terms of downloads and other evidence of customer interest, are:
- UNIFI (UNIversal Financial Industry message scheme). According to ISO 20022, it’s a standard that any electronic fund transfer must be accompanied by a UNIFI document. This standard seems important at least in SEPA (the Single European Payment Area). UNIFI seems to be a major pureXML use case.
- FpML (Financial Products Markup Language). FpML is used in the derivatives market, to actually create contracts and hence derivative securities.
- ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations, Research and Development). When one discusses XML industry standards, ACORD is usually one of the first to come up. It is used in the life insurance agency, also for contract definition/creation. The top use case is agents, although speculate it’s used among investment managers and reinsurers as well.
- STAR (Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail). STAR is used by car manufacturers and retailers to exchange information – about cars, no doubt, and probably some other things as well.
- HR-XML, which is used by human resource departments for resumes and other kinds of employee information.
- OTA (Open Travel Alliance). This is an XML schema used by usual-suspect players in the travel business – hotel chains, car renters, travel agents, and probably anybody else who deals in travel reservations.
I’ve heard at least about the financial services ones from other XML database vendors as well. I’m a little surprised that nothing from the health area made the top of the list.
Categories: Application areas, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, IBM and DB2, pureXML, Structured documents
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[…] A big part of IBM’s XML business strategy is to support various (typically vertical market) XML standards. IBM has implemented support for these standards and made it freely downloadable. What does “support” mean? It surely starts with a DTD (Document Type Definition), and apparently also includes mappings to generic web services interfaces. It turns out that there are a lot of them, so I’m listing some in a separate post. […]
In healthcare, many organizations use HL7. However, not all of these organizations necessarily use native XML storage. (Please note that HL7 Version 2.* did not use the XML data format. HL7 Version 3, with initial standard publication in 2005, uses XML.)
Two other XML standards worth noting are NIEM and XBRL.
In the Government space, there is currently a lot of activity around the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). NIEM is designed to allow agencies to disseminate and exchange information.
The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is gaining adoption for business reporting. The recent US SEC recommendation to mandate XBRL as a format for financial reporting has sparked a lot of interest and activity around XBRL.