Languages for electronic business communication: state of the art

Electronic commerce (e‐commerce) is the new buzzword for doing business on the Internet. A main problem for business‐to‐business e‐commerce lies in the need for the information systems of the involved organizations to exchange meaningful information. For letting the information systems of business partners accomplish electronic business communication, semantic interoperability is necessary to ensure that exchange of information makes sense – that the provider and receiver of information have a common understanding of the “meaning” of the requested services and data. Traditional EDI is not sufficient to solve electronic business communication problems in an open and dynamic environment. Summarizes the development from traditional EDI towards new advanced electronic business communication approaches offering agent‐based e‐commerce marketplaces in which the meaning of business messages is managed by means of shared repositories for formally specifying the semantics of business messages. Within this framework, XML is the practical foundation for structuring the information to be interchanged.