November 9, 1999 Web posted at: 8:30 a.m. EST (1330 GMT) by Ellen Messmer

From...

(IDG) -- Start-up Bowstreet Software has begun shipping the Web Automation Factory, an XML-based server for use in business-to-business electronic commerce.

The Web Automation Factory 1.0 application server lets you take business information from back-end systems and publish it in XML. It supports Microsoft's BizTalk specification for business documents. But Bowstreet founder and program manager Todd Hay says the server can convert data between different XML types, as users design their own business forms based on various XML Document Type Definitions (DTD) or Schemas.

Anyone with XML programming knowledge can invent a DTD, which describes a set of XML tags to define all the fields of a business document. That DTD, perhaps for purchase orders or shipping notices, could be used to share business information with trading partners that agree to support that specific DTD.

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Whole industries might agree on what DTDs to use for transmitting documents by e-mail or HTTP transfer. But XML advocates are now also interested in crafting what's called an XML Schema, which is a more complex XML tagging structure that define the business document more precisely than DTDs.

Microsoft's BizTalk is one such Schema. Meanwhile the World Wide Web Consortium is nearing completion of a standard called XML Schema that would provide a specification for designing business documents.

"There are already hundreds of vocabularies, or schemas," Hay notes. He says the Web Automation Factory, which is available, for NT or Solaris, can translate between different XML types by use of a template-based technology.

"It's naïve to assume that all the vendors will agree on these vocabularies," Hay says. "Customers will have to handle them all."

To accommodate what many expect to be a wide variety of XML-based business documents, Bowstreet's technology would convert between disparate XML types. Other vendors, including WebMethods and OnDisplay, also claim to have products capable of this XML conversion.

The Web Automation Factory uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol to store customer names and the types of XML-formed data that customers are allowed to receive.

Net Ratings, the Milpitas, Calif. firm that researches Nielsen-like ratings for the Internet about advertising and site usage, was part of the early-adopter program for the Bowstreet XML application server.

"Since June we've been using it as an extranet for two of our business partners, AdKnowledge and Adauction," says Dave Toth, president and CEO of Net Ratings. "We do HTML-based reporting, but our business partners needed it in different format to easily add it to their back-end systems. Bowsteet was able to help us re-purpose that data by converting it into XML."

Net Ratings is now organizing use of the Web Automation Factory so that sales personnel can configure the directory capabilities so that customers that may pay up to a maximum of $100,000 per year for reports can get personalized access.

The Web Automation Factory costs $250,000 per year based on a subscription fee.