In April, Microsoft Corp. announced that its new BizTalk 2000 Server--a product for integrating enterprise applications and business processes with those of business partners, trading exchanges or other internal systems--would soon provide support for RosettaNet, a popular XML-based standard for B2B e-commerce in the IT, electronics and semiconductor industries. Microsoft, a founding member of the RosettaNet consortium, said it would provide an "accelerator"--a set of development tools and a parser--to enable BizTalk to communicate with RosettaNet-based systems. Besides RosettaNet, the BizTalk 2000 Server also supports its own XML standard, called the BizTalk Framework, which contains a set of BizTags, or XML tags for specifying how XML documents should be handled.

The move to build in support for RosettaNet comes two months after Microsoft announced that it would create a BizTalk Accelerator for HIPAA, the new set of electronic data exchange standards mandated for healthcare providers by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

Building in support for specific vertical industry standards isn't new; many integration software vendors offer support for one or more. But David Wascha, Microsoft's product manager for BizTalk, believes that all vendors will have to support a range of industry-specific standards in the future. According to him, two sets of XML standards are likely to evolve: a core of basic XML protocols and a top layer of industry-specific standards.

"First, there will be a core set of standards for the basic infrastructure for doing communication with XML or industry standards like ACORD [the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development standards for the insurance industry]," Wascha says. "That core set is called the XML protocol stack by the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium]. Or a lot of people call it TRP, or transport routing protocol. Just like in EDI [Electronic Data Interchange]--there's the core X12 standards as well as industry-specific add-ons that people in various vertical industries have built--the same thing is happening with XML. So you'll see the XML protocol stack coming out of the W3C; then you'll see these industries such as healthcare, chemical, etc., building pieces that snap onto the top of the core infrastructure."

Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst for ZapThink, an analyst and consulting firm that reports on XML-based standards, agrees with Wascha: "In the beginning," he says, "there were XML standards. These XML standards had to do two things: specify a specific language of exchange for a particular industry as well as specify the way that those documents are exchanged. They had to specify the transport, routing and protocol layer because, without it, there would be no way to talk about insurance, as in the case of ACORD, or financial derivatives, such as fpML [Financial Products Markup Language]. Now that a common middle layer is being created, there is no reason for vertical industry standards to specify these layers. The standards that take advantage of this common middle and core tier--XML Schema, XML Protocol, XML Query, ebXML, etc.--will survive. Those that provide their own tier will probably die out." Schmelzer's report, the ZapThink XML Standards Watch, lists more than 400 current vertical and horizontal XML standards.