Standardised confusion: Stibo Group. (Internet Focus).

Stibo Group

The Internet has an ever increasing number of businesses choosing the web as a viable business channel raising the challenge of data standardisation in order that that information can be easily accessed by both customers, and the extended channel. With more than 2,000 separate standards from technology-specific and chosen industry standards, ensuring that business selects the right one is proving the final hurdle to an integrated global e-commerce marketplace. Business is also looking at how the new technology can be used to maximise the number of potential customers to which it provides access. Organisations have started to look at means of addressing this new market by developing cross-media product catalogues, providing information for both online and catalogue formats. As the numbers of business portals and e-marketplaces increase the real challenge will be how to achieve data standardisation!

The Internet is no stranger to tackling e-concepts and standards head on. Consider the discussions that have taken place around e-business, e-procurement, e-commerce, e-auctions and e-learning, now all commonly accepted web-based processes allowing individuals access to products or information previously not readily available. One of the largest concepts, e-banking, is proof that these ideas, once seen as being unachievable, have now found their way into the heart of British business. With such sensitive data, the development of agreed industry standards and formats has been a central part of this advance.

Comment:

The cynics would argue that the dotcom community has been trying to establish a single set of accepted standards for more than ten years - and that even now there is some debate over the specific programming standards. Given the relatively small number of options the industry was faced with it still took over a decade to finally get a consensus. The data management industry with its growing list of more than 2,000 data standards, including both technology and industry specific formats, will require considerable time and discussion in order to select a unifying standard which will allow varying degrees of product data to be accessed. The current diversity and confusion was highlighted recently when a Danish company was awarded the contract to operate the national Public Procurement Portal, and having chosen the emerging RUS standard because of its ability to deliver high level of product detail - found that due to it being a subscription-based standard it wasn't readily available to all businesses. As a result it was forced to adopt a third standard - the publicly available UNSPSC standard in order to accommodate the full range of Danish businesses. The question this raises is given that UNSPSC is the accepted data standard of the Danish Ministry of IT and Research - should this not have become the default standard on which the entire country's e-commerce should be built?

XML?

There will be many who argue-that the standard for e-commerce data has already been found. The emergence of XML as the chosen language of the web makes it the perfect data standard for business. It is true, that XML has become the widely accepted data transportation standard, however the complexity of data required for integrated e-commerce ensures it has considerable limitations. While the current confusion means that within the community it has been accepted as the best-fit standard, holding the answer in the short term, XML is far from the Holy Grail. As a programming language XML is limited to describing the structure or syntax of the data, but fails to deal with its semantic detail. For e-commerce to grow, and develop into an effective channel, data semantics are essential, and highlight the requirements of the future standard which can provide a solution with increasingly complex data.

Two Thousand Standards

The question is not what the solution should be, but how does the industry assess the merits of each of more than two thousand standards, to reach a consensus on the most effective and accessible data format for all business. The Internet is a global experience, and needs an all encompassing standard rather than the industry or national guidance it has currently. The Stibo Group working to ensure that our solutions are tailored to a customers' requirements, recently delivered data for one client in more than 2,000 different formats. The inefficiency of this process, both for solutions providers and customers alike, is obvious - but at the moment there is no other option.

If the Internet is to become an effective commercial marketplace providing opportunities to increase performance and develop new markets, then discussions need to be organised now in order that we do not suffer the same fate as the home video recorder industry, which adopted the BetaMax standard months before the home video tape industry decided that VHS was the future of the industry

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