An extensible business communication language

A main problem for electronic commerce, particularly for business-to-busine ss applications, lies in the need for the involved information systems to m eaningfully exchange information. Domain-specific standards may be used to define the semantics of common terms. However, in practice it is not easy t o find those domain-specific standards that are detailed and stable enough to allow for real interoperability. Therefore, we propose an architecture t hat allows for incremental construction of a shared repository including a multilingual thesaurus, which is used in a business communication language. Communicating information systems then refer to the common thesaurus while exchanging messages. Our emphasis is be on separating semantics (in the th esaurus) and syntax (in XML). Therefore, our extensibility is not only that of XML, but also the extensibility of the semantics that is modeled in the shared repository. The business communication language XLBC is presented a nd how it can be used in electronic commerce applications. XLBC message pat terns and conversation protocols are stored in the shared repository as wel l.