It's not enough to build an e-presence - the goal is to transform into an e-business. To reach this goal, e-business managers must do much more than give customers access to their catalogue, order entry system and billing system - they must give customers simple and immediate access to everything the organisation knows.

Why? Because customers are not just shopping - they're comparing specifications, researching capabilities, checking terms and conditions, learning operating instructions and performing diagnostics. If your competitors can deliver a better experience by providing more plentiful and easier to use information, your customers will find them - they're just a click away.

This presentation will focus on how XML can be used to build the following applications to support e-business initiatives, providing customer references as examples.

Direct materials are those "goods" a company needs to build what they sell. Whether it's grain for Kelloggs' cereal or steel for General Motors' automobiles, direct materials are mission-critical to a company. Purchase of direct materials is currently automated through EDI and VANs. That situation is rapidly changing, however, and Internet transactions will be the dominant trend as they provide these critical advantages: ubiquitous access, lower transaction cost and the increased participation of small-and medium-sized enterprises in trade exchanges. Unfortunately, current Internet-based B2B transaction exchanges only address the procurement of indirect materials, which are supporting materials and by definition non-essential: light bulbs, pens etc. Further compounding their inadequacy, these transaction exchange systems do not have the capability to fulfil the more complex information needs of direct materials purchases, such as guaranteed delivery and security, document routing and auditing services.

This presentation will look at the relevance of XML and how it replaces EDI. It will then focus on the three levels of ROI that can be realised from implementing direct materials into B2B exchanges.

There are many existing and emerging standards for using EDI and XML for communicating with trading partners. Given that no one standard is dominate and that there are still many trading partners who are slow or reluctant to e-nable their systems, what architecture can you put in place using XML that enables communicating with all of them, regardless of their system or current reliance on earlier forms of electronic communication.

The National Archives is maintenance agency for the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS), a resource discovery metadata standard based on the Dublin Core standard. Recently, the Federal government launched its Online Strategy aimed at assisting agencies to deliver information and services online. AGLS metadata is one of the key enablers to help agencies implement the Online strategy and was mandated for use by Commonwealth government agencies in the strategy. This paper will cover:

• • the role of metadata in resource discovery and the development of the AGLS metadata standard;
• • AGLS metadata elements and qualifiers;
• • metadata and the Government Online strategy (i.e. implementation issues); and
• • the relationship between record keeping metadata and resource discovery metadata.

The XML Grammar 1.0 Recommendation defines a Document Type Definition as a structure that defines the valid relationships between elements and attributes in an XML document. These relationships can then be compared against a single instance of an XML document to ascertain its validity. With the advent of XML Schemas, validation is still an option, but the structural definition of an XML document in XML provides additional capabilities that go along with DTDs. This session will discuss alternative uses for XML Schemas in e-commerce solutions.

Currently, no visual applications exist to allow connections to different databases to quickly store and retrieve XML and XSL files, apply the stylesheets to XML files, and store the results in other databases. Using the XML Transviewer Beans, we show how this is done with Oracle8i and how these can be used in real-world B2B applications. The Beans are easy to install and can be used to:

• • Be maintained in CLOB tables in Oracle8i
• • Import/export XML, XSL, HTML to CLOB tables in the database of file system
• • Submit SQL and convert the result set into XML
• • Show XML, XSL and HTML
• • Edit XML, XSL and HTML
• • Apply XSL Transformation
• • Visualise the result.

SanSonoma.com is possibly the first bilingual XML/XSL Web site doing business with its suppliers and content providers in Japan. This is done using XSL technology to provide web systems to our customers via Internet cell phones in Japan. Restaurant owners are able to update inventory and request deliveries using their iMode, etc telephones. With buyers in California, content providers in Tokyo and Napa Valley, SanSonoma.com has used XML to solve a huge data and inventory management headache. This site also provides a simple entry and update web based system for either Japanese or English speakers that has the ability to be updated 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world.

This presentation will explain the technical problems first encountered in developing the system and will also cover the business difficulties in dragging your business partners into the 21st century. The presentation will also talk about the shortfalls of XML in the real world.

It is widely accepted that XML will become the language of business-to-business (B2B) interchange over the Internet. It's also accepted that the impact of B2B on many industries will be enormous. Put simply, B2B can allow a company to save money and grow markets. Consequently, most companies need to quickly implement an effective XML-based B2B infrastructure, or face even more severe aggressive competition.

This presentation discusses the background to, and possible architectures of, XML-based infrastructures suitable for medium to large organisations. Topics covered include Systems and Applications Integration, XML based EDI, coping with many XML standards, Integration Servers, Cross Enterprise Workflow modelling and others. It finishes with a demonstration of building an XML-based Portal site; an ideal first step towards an XML-based B2B Infrastructure.

Suppliers: Hear how to differentiate yourselves on emarkets that just want your lowest price. Buyers: Learn how to save money by automating buying processes. Everyone: Learn how to connect as freely and flexibly as possible to all your partners (be they customer, supplier or other).

Future success with B2B will largely depend upon how readily your partners can communicate with your organisation. They will be speaking XML so... be prepared!

The potential combination of XML for portable Internet data exchange, Java for portable application logic, and Enterprise relational databases for mission-critical data management provides the technology platform of choice for the Internet Applications running the world's e-Businesses. Describing the structure and datatypes of XML documents to enable integration with databases simplifies the management of the increasing amount of data in your enterprise. This paper discusses how relational databases and XML fit together and describes Oracle's approach to providing such technology. The session will conclude by discussing how the rapidly emerging B2B exchanges are leveraging the above technologies.

There's a lot of talk about the future of E-Commerce and B2B applications, but what standards are out there today that businesses can use? What initiatives are driving the standards, and who is creating useful proprietary markup for E-Commerce? This tutorial will discuss what's happening with some of the main players, including BizTalk and ICE. ECML, CBL, and other related topics will also be included. The similarities between languages and ideologies will be examined, as well as how these standards can work together to give businesses the maximum benefit of all that is available today while preparing for tomorrow.

As the better-known industry initiatives are discussed, their purposes, plans, and level of competition and camaraderie will be explored. An investigation will be made into the role that XML will play in the future of these standards, as well as the extent to which the current E-Commerce schemas have been used by merchants. Also, the question of whether the initiatives will level the playing field for small businesses will be analyzed. The tutorial will close with a demonstration that will take the audience through a sample transaction, using a variety of components related to current standard initiatives and E-Commerce languages.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organisation which gave us XML and is currently developing the other core XML recommendations. Its mission is to lead the Web to its full potential. The Web has come a long way already, as demonstrated by the growth in the Internet and in XML. However, the potential for the Web for bringing people and information together is even greater. Realising this potential involves both social as well as technical direction.

This presentation introduces the W3C, its background and how it works; in particular, how you can benefit from their work and be involved in the process. An overview of the W3C activity areas and the recommendations will be given. This overview will provide an understanding of what they are for and how they realise the potential of the Web.

XML gained its recent popularity because of its ability to represent database information in a compact, interchangeable form. This makes it ideal for building web-based applications which have database back-ends.

But XML is also suited to more traditional document production environments, especially in legal, regulatory and legislative applications, technical manuals, and other document types where widely-based authoring is combined with centralised document management and delivery on paper is still required

In 1997, Bell Atlantic (then NYNEX), a large, East-Coast US based telecommunications provider, contracted a supplier to deliver a new publishing system for the web-based management and production of stated and federally regulated telecommuncations tariff documents.

This presentation will examine the nature of the documents, the problems expressed in the business processes behind the documents, and how they were addressed.

Integrating XML with Enterprise Databases and Application Servers gives developers a leg up in satisfying the increasing demand for access to information and applications in a distributed environment. This paper will explore specific data driven and content management applications that were implemented using XML and related technologies. It will focus on architectural decisions, component requirements, best practice techniques and deployment considerations. The examined applications feature a multi-tier architecture utilising an object-relational database, web/ application server and client application/ browser distributed across an intranet or the Internet. These applications utilise the latest XML technologies including XSL Transformations, XPath, and XML Schema. Finally, this paper will show how these examples can be extended and will present available XML resources.

In science fiction movies and television shows, past and present, humans of the future are often shown interacting with computers to receive information built from a vast database of knowledge somewhere. The computers are able to quickly assemble, from a galaxy's worth of data, the precise information needed at the time by the user. But how was that data organised? What mechanisms were used to aggregate the information from what must have been millions of documents generated from thousands of sources including human writers and databases?

This paper will demonstrate that the future is, in fact, now. Standards and techniques now exist which allow the grouping and organisation of data so that it can be retrieved and processed quickly and efficiently. The standards include the XML family of standards as well as the Topic Maps international standard adopted earlier this year. The techniques include semantic networks and expert systems.

The ability of XLink (XML Linking Language) to store hyper-links outside of the documents they refer to is ideal for adding annotations to documents without changing their original content. This presentation will look at how annotations can be specified in XLink and demonstrate how this works in practice in a document annotation system.

In particular it will show how XLink annotations can be specified and resolved within normal HTML pages using existing HTML browsers and web servers. The resolution of XLinks across multiple documents and multiple sites will be discussed with reference to a working XLink database.

Methods for adding annotations via e-mail and forms will be demonstrated as well as techniques for moderating annotations.

There will also be a brief discussion of how XLink, XSL and Topic Maps can be combined for managing web site links, site structure and document versioning.

The Department of Lands, Planning and Environment was created in July 1995 as the lead land management, land development and land information agency in the Northern Territory (NT). Following the addition of the agency responsible for water resources management in October 1996, the Department now comprises most of the land, water and environmental management-related functions carried out by the NT Government. Land and Geographical (spatial) Information is critical to promote economic and social development, improve management of our natural resources and protect the environment. It is in these latter two fields that there has been a great deal of activity at the national and state levels in recent times.

This presentation provides an overview of the Department's use of XML to get its own corporate spatial data into order so that it is in a position to effectively supply spatial data to emerging national and international standards. The Department has partnered with a number of innovative private sector companies to develop practical implementations of XML to deliver spatial data and a number of these will be demonstrated.

XML has the potential to change dramatically the way Web sites are managed. In this session, we'll have live demos that use XML and related technologies to:

• • Serve pages built dynamically for each user
• • Serve pages built dynamically for each browser type
• • Support non-traditional browsers in mobile phones, pagers, palmtops, etc
• • Generate HTML, ZIP, and PDF files from a single output, using free, open source tools that run on any Java-enabled platform.

Using XML, we can simplify content creation and management. Content is created once, then transformed multiple times for a variety of purposes. Best of all, our process is built on open standards, uses open source tools, and runs anywhere.

Word processors are ubiquitous - and one in particular is unavoidable. This represents both a social and technical challenge for XML practitioners.

XML's moral superiority notwithstanding, many users like their office suites and given that office suites are widely used (and occasionally even used well) what role can XML play in the word processing world? First and foremost, there is the perennial problem of interchange - getting word processor files into XML so they can be easily validated, published and otherwise processed.

Microsoft's sort-of-but-not-quite XML output from its Office 2000 suite - including Word - is designed to display in standard web browsers while still capturing all of Word's formatting and structure. We show how some relatively minor transformations on the controversial MSO HTML format can turn it into 'real' XML.

With the intense interest in XML for the web and eBusiness, it's easy to overlook the fact that XML can have enormous benefits to an organisation in a more traditional area - the creation and processing of documents.

This talk is in two parts. The first part deals with the advantages of creating documents in XML as opposed to using a word processor. These advantages are discussed with a view to identifying the areas where XML can have the greatest benefit, and how to construct a sound business case for changing the current method of document creation.

The second part deals with one of the biggest obstacles to switching to XML - the problem of legacy data. The various options for converting legacy data to XML and their relative merits are discussed.

During the time that XML has been on the scene, a lot of discussion and debate in the developer community has centered on vocabularies and the representation of data. Over the past year or so, some of that focus has moved on to protocols for XML transport and syndication, defining how to move data between disparate environments. We will ask ourselves the questions:

• • Why do we need transport for XML?
• • Don't we already have HTTP? and
• • Why is syndication important to me?

As elsewhere in the XML world, various alternatives are arising. This presentation will give an overview of the origin and application of various protocols which are receiving support such as RSS, XML-RPC, SOAP and WDDX. We'll also take some risk and speculate on which protocols might survive In the marketplace over the coming years.

The use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to store patient health information is becoming increasingly prevalent. In today's distributed healthcare environment, there are obvious benefits to be gained from being able to store, query and exchange this information between different health care sites. One approach to implementing EHRs, which is currently under trial in Australia, is based on the Good Electronic Health Record (GEHR) architecture. This approach uses XML-Schema to represent a framework that enables EHR which can vary based on local, state and federally dictated clinical practices.

This presentation describes a trial GEHR implementation, in which clinical archetypes are modelled using XML-Schema. The application of other XML technologies to the implementation of health records is also described.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) has become a common aspect of software development. It is widely used in various layers or tiers by such diverse sets of people as system administrators, clients, QA engineers and others.

If the GUI needs to run on many platforms, in different languages and on different backends development can become tedious but this problem can be solved in several different ways, specifically by using XML technology. This presentation will contain the following:

• Architecture and syntax for using XML to represent an interface
• How to develop the GUI factory object
• How to define the XML tags to incorporate the events and appearance.

The presentation focuses on the design and architecture of SODA2, an XML database management system that has been developed at the University of New South Wales. SODA2 stands for Semistructured Object Database, version 2. Its novel architecture facilitates several crucial features which are seldom available in other database systems. The SODA2 query processor is mainly located at the client side. Each query processor contains an internal query translator that maps a query from one language into the SODA2 internal query operations.

Therefore, SODA2 supports multiple query languages which include XPath expressions, XQL, XML-QL and SODA-QL to date. e-business and e-commerce applications can be built by linking to the SODA2 client library. Advanced wrapper system plays an important role in SODA2, as it provides a bridge to data types or different data sources such as email, HTML, SGML, EDI etc.

XML brings the expressive power to define one's own tag sets meaningful to one's particular domain, thus making it possible for different Document Type Definitions (DTD) to co-exist on the Web. How do these DTDs fit together? Can elements of different DTDs interact with one another and to what extent? Is it necessary to develop a separate set of tools and supporting software for each DTD? Is it possible to make these supporting software and tools interoperable across different DTDs, and to what level is this possible? Is it possible to derive a DTD on an existing one, or must each DTD be a completely new entity? If this is possible can the derivation process be automated, and to what extent can automation be supported?

LifeWeb is a system that can give some answers to the above questions. It is an object-oriented data model for the Web document system, built upon the concept of Life Design and represented in XML. Life Design is a software design methodology drawing upon natural life at the molecular, genetic and biological levels. It imitates the structure and working of organic life forms at the molecular and genetic levels to construct entities with biologically life-like functionalities.

It is inconvenient to make XML documents visible on web browsers because XML separates data from its presentation rules. Thus, users have to build XML documents and the associated stylesheet separately in order to render XML documents on web browsers.

In this paper, we propose an XML editor to build XML documents in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) fashion like WISIWIG HTML editor such as Microsoft FrontPage. The XML editor proposed in this paper is designed to specify styling information by using CSS1(Cascading Style Sheet level 1) in WYSIWYG fashion so that users can style XML documents in a single effort.

There are a growing number of applications becoming available for authoring XML documents. These range from high-end products, often featuring the ability to constrain document authoring to a given schema, to low-end products which offer little more than direct editing of XML source. All of these applications tend to expose the user to the XML source of their document, when in fact most users do not wish or need to be concerned with the low-level representation of the information.

This paper will examine tools and techniques available for creating customised authoring systems, for use both on the desktop or Web-based. These systems aim to address the needs of authoring information for particular vertical markets. Existing products and toolsets will be examined that provide facilities to use for achieving this aim, as well as extensions and further developments of the Swish XML editor.

While my company, Zveno Pty Ltd, is able to offer a number of XML and XSL seminars and tutorials, we feel that two in particular would be suitable for this conference. Both of these tutorials are of half-day duration.

Integrating processes inside the enterprise and across the supply chain creates new efficiencies and facilitates sustainable competitive advantage. By automating the exchange of business information in transactions such as purchasing, billing, and inventory control, companies can dramatically cut costs, shorten cycle times, and reduce errors.

Consisting of XdiSchemas and XdiScript, XdiL has been designed to support the transformation and rule-based processing of XML documents. Based on XML Schemas, the attribute and element extensions of XdiSchemas tightly bind the element and content-model declarations of XML Schemas to those of source documents, so that an XdiSchema constitutes an 'XML-interface” to its corresponding native file. We narrowly refer to this bi-directional mapping between native files and XML using XdiSchemas as ‘transformation.”

Though the structure of transformed XML largely depends on the structure of its source, XdiScript can be used to perform more general processing, called ‘conversion.” XdiScript consists of a subset of Javascript with extensions enabling it to access the content models of XML documents and can be embedded in XML Schemas for type-checking and sophisticated data manipulation.

Enterprises large or small, face the challenge of providing new channels of distribution (be it just syndicated information assets, e-commerce transactions, EDI etc). Use of an application Framework (an open architecture based on Java/XML standards) with XML used as a database-neutral format and a messaging infrastructure between different tiers, XSL used for transformation and formatting offers tremendous flexibility and advantages for multi-tiered architectures.

Within the application framework, we discuss the use of:

• • An XML Repository implemented with LDAP for Internet-wide System independent resolution of System ID's (no new API for resolving XML data elements), replication of the Repository contents and interoperability between software agents in the face of multiple XML vocabularies
• • Extensions to the XML Repository that can provide additional semantics for different output methods, Digital signatures for Authentication and Security requirements, XSLT Compiler Translets, Topic Maps
• • JMS based Messaging, open Stds that allow a flexible path to service new client device types, authentication with Java Cards.

The purpose of this case study is to provide an overview of the development and implementation of the National Business Information Service (NBIS) Harvesting System.

AusIndustry's Business Information Service (BIS) has developed a system to collect, aggregate and distribute business related, resource information from all three levels of government; Commonwealth, State/Territory and Local.

The case study addresses the use of XML in the harvesting system. It also covers the requirements addressed by the harvesting system, the review of BIS Metadata schema and the consequent development of the NBIS Resource DTD. It concludes with a detailed overview of the NBIS harvesting system.

In 1999, the use of XML went mainstream. IBM has helped many companies throughout Asia Pacific and other regions of the world become early adopters of XML by providing XML tools and partnering with them to help them build business solutions that leverage their existing core business systems and skills. This presentation will discuss success stories from AsiaPacific companies such as Nippon Fire and Marine, LANSA, Digital Information Bank, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd., ecVisions, Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd, and other companies we've been involved in as well as provide some hints and tips for how you can get started using XML in your company's business applications.

Automated aggregation, syndication and personalisation of content - are we talking sci fi or have there been sightings in the real world?

New standards and software tools that support them are now making it possible to automate at least some aspects of these business processes resulting in immediate benefits to the bottom line.

ICE (Information and Content Exchange) and PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Meta-Data) are industry standards key to this process. ICE is an XML standard for online syndication that provides automated, reliable delivery of content. PRISM is the standard metadata language that specifies and describes both the content that is being delivered and the correct Rights and Permissions that should accompany each of the content components.

This presentation will feature a live demonstration showing how the ICE and PRISM industry standard vocabularies and software tools enabled by these standards will open up new revenue opportunities in e-business environments.

The FT.com Content Syndication Program is an XML store from end to end. We rely on the data handling capabilities of this new breed of structured mark-up to create and enrich our article content and to handle its transformations into HTML.

FT is a daily newspaper, published in sites around the world and available at newsstands and on delivery around the world - all on the salmon pink paper stock. Based on XML, FT.com uses SQL, Perl, Java and java server pages to pull articles, reports, columns and features, graphs, advertisements, video presentations, banners, buttons and graphics from Oracle databases. These pages are dynamically generated for publication to the web site.

All of the content that we own is for sale through our Content Syndication program using the ICE protocol for service definitions and the Apache and tomcat servers for content transport.

This presentation will explain how the Information Content and Exchange (ICE) protocol is impacting upon syndication by facilitating the creation of new business models for companies in virtually any industry. It will also provide examples of the way in which successful companies are using applications based on ICE to syndicate content today.

The ICE syntax is an XML-based protocol for distributing content. This presentation will give an overview of ICE and then focus on different ways in which content can be distributed using ICE. Specifically it will show how application data can be mapped to the ICE protocol for efficient distribution.

Finally an overview of ICE will review the goals and scope of ICE, the Syndication model, Subscription Offers, Subscribers and Subscriptions, and Content Distribution.

In this joint presentation, Peter Meyer (Elkera) and Suman Pai (Datamatics) describe the planning, pitfalls and challenges involved in large scale SGML/XML conversion projects. Issues are discussed from the perspective of the application developer, the project manager and the conversion contractor. Using real examples, the presentation will describe how to develop and manage the DTD, documentation, how to specify and verify the accuracy of text capture and how to specify and ensure the semantic accuracy of the SGML/XML markup. The following points will be addressed:

• • the project objectives analysis and definition
• • data analysis for the DTD
• • a communication methodology and query handling system
• • markup requirements to provide detailed examples and directions
• • contract specifications for data and markup accuracy.

Geographic Business Systems Pty Ltd in partnership with the NT Department of Lands, Planning and Environment are redeveloping the department's Land Administration Information System which implements all Northern Territory land transactions. The redeveloped system will be completely XML-based with its Web-based user interface logically separated from the internal business processes through using XSLT and other conversions. All business processes will be implemented as a series of 'black boxes” which take a XML document as input and produce a XML document as output. The system will cater for complex tasks such as document scanning, vector graphics, relational database storage, and messaging services. Where possible, existing XML standards will be used. One example is the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) XML standard. The Department has been very successful at delivering maps over the Internet using this technology.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are a new W3C Specification which make it possible to express vector graphics (and more) in an XML form. Being XML-based, you can also dynamically create vector images from applications - including Web-based CGIs. Nick Hodge is the Technical Resources Manager for Adobe South East and has broad experience in both print and Web markets.

The Content Network Protocol allows requests to be simultaneously distributed to all the servers in a content network. It aslo allows the responses to be aggregated, ordered, and presented as if coming from one server and supports secure, access controlled exchange of content. This presentation will explain the how and why of this XML-based technology.

Research tells us that it is much more cost effective to retain and invest in our existing customer base than to build or buy market share. Customer data forms the foundation to build effective customer relationships. To be effective, customer data must meet the highest possible standards of both quality and integrity.

XML is now being widely adopted and is clearly becoming an industry standard for data interchange, data management and for delivering content on the Internet.

This presentation will look at an application independent XML standard for name and address data management called Name and Address Markup Language (NAML) and an XML standard for customer information quality called Customer Identity Markup Language (CIML). CIML provides a framework for representing different data about a customer and as a result, helps to uniquely identify a customer. NAML is a subset of CIML and both can work together or independent of each other.

The information environment of the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO) command and control domain is voluminous, distributed, and diverse. As the ADO has evolved and rationalised there are now numerous information systems containing duplicate and/or redundant information. Information resides in different formats, in different places, on different computer systems.

In this talk we describe the use of XML in a prototype system (currently called MANIFOLD) that allows interoperability across a wide range of such legacy data management systems within the ADO, including those handling relational data, web pages, text files, images and ship and vehicle tracks.

A mediation-based architecture was adopted wherein MANIFOLD maintains an overall business entity model that end-users can see and pose queries to, and each participating data management system provides an adaptor that provides the interface between MANIFOLD and the data source.

Tenix provides around 2,000 equipment related maintenance routines for each ANZAC Frigate. Authoring began in 1993 using WordPerfect merge tables. We produced more than 20 different extracts from these tables, including electronic deliverables into Client's maintenance system. However, by Ship 3 delivery in 1998, we had 6,000 routines, and it was clear that the WordPerfect system and data would be unmaintainable well before our 10th Ship was delivered in 2006.

After a long study and selection process, we acquired an integrated XML-based content management and Web-delivery system. This system allows routines to be related to configuration items in the class, rather than ships. An authoring DTD allows us to maintain RAN and RNZN variant texts in the one routine.

This talk will look at the issues of selecting and implementing a production and management environment in defence publishing.

For publishers with expanding databases or content repositories that contain information that have to be published every quarter, this presentation takes a look at how 'Mark-up Languages” and the associated technologies, have assisted in dramatically reducing the production time and costs involved in publishing. The review case studies both XML and SGML projects across various industries from Software Development Companies to Publishing Houses.