Bay Area Roundtable (BART)

Scaling for the Internet Series, meeting 4

Sharing Knowledge Across Organizations with
eXtensible Markup Language (XML)

XML, The Least You Need To Know
Rohit Khare, UC Irvine / IRUS, rohit@ics.uci.edu

Media hype may portray eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as merely a way out of the `browser wars' over control of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), but the ability to add new tags and create new document types has wide- ranging implications for information management within -- and across -- organizations. In this talk, we will walk through the XML specification and present deployment scenarios with sample Document Type Definitions (DTDs), as well as ancillary specifications for XML Linking (XLL) and XML Stylesheets (XSL). As time permits, I will also discuss the state of the XML software development market and highlight key applications.

Biography: Rohit Khare joined the Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of California, Irvine in Fall 1997, after serving as a member of the MCI Internet Architecture staff. He was previously on the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT, where he focused on security and electronic commerce issues. He has been involved in the development of cryptographic software tools and Web-related standards development. Rohit received a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science and in Economics from California Institute of Technology in 1995.

Component-based Commerce: Building Blocks for the Network Economy
Jay M. Tenenbaum, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Veo Systems Inc., jmt@veosystems.com

Today's Web provides people with unprecedented access to online information and services. However, because the information is unstructured, computers cannot readily understand it. This limitation helps explain why search engines and automated shopping agents don't work very well.

Tomorrow's Web will provide information and services in a structured form that is readily accessible to both people and computers. For Internet commerce, this means standard documents for describing things like products, airline schedules, stock reports, and bank statements, and corresponding forms for placing orders, booking reservations, and making transactions. Thousands of companies will use such documents to publish information about themselves and their services directly on the Web where they'll be available to anyone -- or any web-enabled application -- with the proper authorization. FedEx and UPS for example will likely offer shipping services, Citibank and Bank of America payment services, and so forth. Customers and suppliers will put these services on their intranets and integrate them into their core business processes and systems. Businesses will build on each other's services, using them as components to create innovative virtual companies, markets, and trading communities. This ability to rapidly experiment with new business concepts will spark an explosion of entrepreneurial activity rivaling that of the web itself.

Biography: Dr. Jay M. Tenenbaum, Chairman and Chief Scientist of Veo Systems Inc., is widely acknowledged as a founder of Internet commerce and the field's leading visionary. In 1990 he started Enterprise Integration Technologies, the company that pioneered the enabling security and payment infrastructure for the Internet. In 1994, he formed CommerceNet industry association and jump-started the Internet marketplace by convincing 50 leading corporations to get online. In 1997, he co-founded CNgroup to extend and commercialize his vision of "component-based commerce" in which online businesses interconnect to form virtual companies, markets, and trading communities. He remains the Chairman of CommerceNet and currently serves on the boards of six Internet start-ups.

Directions to meeting are available

Upcoming Meeting:

Friday, June 12, 1998
Topic: Scaling for the Internet Series, meeting 5:
           Languages for the Internet
Coordinator: David Redmiles, UC Irvine/IRUS, redmiles@ics.uci.edu
Speakers: Hannes Marais, Digital Systems Research Center
                  Michael Franz, UC Irvine/IRUS

The Irvine Research Unit in Software wishes to thank its corporate sponsors:

Sustaining:

The Boeing Company * Boeing North American, Inc. * Northrop Grumman Corporation *
Raytheon Company * Sun Microsystems Laboratories * TRW

Supporting:

Beckman Instruments * Continuus Software Corporation * FileNet Corporation * Lockheed Martin * Printronix, Inc.

For further information on BART or IRUS, contact
        Debra Brodbeck at (949) 824-2260; brodbeck@ics.uci.edu