| Imagine an online phone book that not only helps your company contact its trading partners, but also provides the data you need to integrate your e-business applications with theirs.
That’s the idea behind the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) project, launched by Ariba, IBM, Microsoft and 33 other companies.
Under the initiative, member companies will create standard formats for businesses to describe themselves and indicate how they want to receive e-commerce transactions. That data will be pulled together in an online UDDI Business Registry.
Using the directory, companies that have never done business with one another will be able to pull up a standard set of data about each other, officials said. Included would be information about the types of data a particular company can accept and how transactions should be formatted. |
