FRAMINGHAM (02/25/2000) - Forget the multibillion-dollar market forecasts. For now, business-to-business e-commerce remains in search of a common framework to help companies efficiently execute transactions over the Internet.

The promise lies in Extensible Markup Language, or XML, which companies can use to categorize and tag data for exchange between disparate technology systems.

But reality bites.

Corporate users must sift through an alphabet soup of technology frameworks and data definitions being worked on by sometimes competing clusters of standards and industry groups and vendors, with little chance of an electronic Esperanto surfacing anytime soon.

"The challenge really is, at a certain point, to simplify. Once they've got these standards defined and stabilized, start converging them," said James Kobielus, an analyst at The Burton Group in Midvale, Utah. But Kobielus estimated that this convergence could take five to 10 years to settle into a concrete state, adding, "It's going to be a mess."

Right now, at least a dozen vertical industries have groups working to define the types of documents they need to exchange and the various data elements that must be part of those documents.

Tom Costello, chief technology officer at E-Steel Corp. in New York, which operates an Internet-based steel marketplace, said industry groups must set the standards, at least initially. "If you were to wait to get the global community to agree on a generic business-to-business standard, you'd never get one," he said.

E-Steel, for example, is working on the Steel Markup Language to enable the industry's buyers and sellers to exchange product and order information.

Costello said he thinks that as individual vertical working groups come up with XML formats, they will borrow from one another.

That has already happened with the insurance industry's standards-setting body, the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD) in Pearl River, N.Y. Where it made sense, ACORD's property and casualty division adopted the XML-based framework developed by the Interactive Financial Exchange, the online financial service industry's standards group, said ACORD director Beth Grossman. "We thought there would be a lot of synergies," she said.

Seeking to prevent fragmentation and move quickly, ACORD's property and casualty group used established formats wherever possible, reworking electronic data interchange standards to develop its dictionary of data tags.

Yet despite their best efforts, that's not going to solve every problem. "There are a lot of vertical industries out there like finance and insurance and health care that are related. But they're having XML initiatives driven out of separate verticals, and there's no horizontal standards effort to pull all those together," said Kevin Schipani, a group manager at ACORD.

As a result, there's much duplication of effort across the various industry-based standards groups, said Nick Lanyon, who chairs a working group within the OpenTravel Alliance in Washington, which will soon publish its first XML standard, a customer profile format, for the travel industry.

"We had to implement a lot of infrastructure stuff, which we rather would have picked up from [another] industry group," Lanyon said. "But in the travel industry, there are some real problems that XML could help solve now."

Yet signs of hope are emerging. On the data side, the World Wide Web Consortium expects to finish an XML schema specification this year that will standardize the way documents and data elements are defined - and force the industry groups that have already developed data definitions to convert to the new format.

United Nations Involved

Another emerging effort backed by several major industries is electronic-business XML (ebXML), which is being developed by a group that comprises members from the United Nations Centre for the Facilitation of Procedures and Practices for Administration, Commerce and Transport and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. The group hopes to complete some work in the next 18 months.

"It holds the most promise for identifying the best-of-breed recommendations for XML interoperability," said Tom Warner, chairman of the Washington-based Aerospace Industries Association's e-commerce work group. He also pointed out that ebXML seeks to define repositories, registries, transport and packaging protocols, security mechanisms, architecture and business process models.

Josh Walker, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said new standards groups keep popping up. As they do, he said, "there's certainly confusion around what businesses are doing and what individual working groups are doing."