XML, A Collaborative Enabler of E-Business through the Mediation of Heterogeneous Data between Trading Partners

The Internet is providing dramatic new strategic opportunities for electronic business, especially in terms of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. B2B e-commerce offers unprecedented opportunities for creating new trading partnerships, and, arguably, may be the greatest driver of business change in this era. Gerry Galewski, a philosopher on IT, said, “The existence of the Internet has created the ability to reinvent the way that we fundamentally do business to make us all more interconnected, closer in time and space, with less manual work, our processes more timely, and our operations more and more streamlined.”