Fw: Denmark builds XML-based Web services commerce network

[jon.bosak@sun.com]

You'll probably be seeing a lot more about this in 2007.

   http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1233529,00.html

Jon

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Web Services News
Denmark builds XML-based Web services commerce network
By Michael Meehan, News Editor
07 Dec 2006 | SearchWebServcies.com

Boston – A return to the heady notion of business-to-business
integration was featured during a session yesterday at the XML
2006 conference. The Danish government plans on instituting a
massive service-oriented e-commerce network by late 2007 that will
generate Universal Business Language (UBL) 2.0 business documents
such as purchase orders and invoices for both public and private
sector transactions.

In addition to the XML-based UBL documents, the system will
leverage Web services standards like SOAP 1.1, UDDI 3.0, WSDL 1.1,
WS-Security 1.0 and WS-ReliableMessaging. The system will replace
a proprietary Electronic Data Interchange value-added network
(VAN) currently used by the Danish government to conduct business,
saving on exorbitant per-kilocharacter data transformation costs
and opening up the e-commerce network to any business with a Web
connection.

"It should be as easy to send a business document electronically
as it is to send an e-mail," said Mikkel Hippe Brun, chief
consultant for Denmark's Center for Service-Oriented
Infrastructure, part of the national IT and telecom agency.

The new system will be required to handle more than 200 million
transactions a year, offer a national services registry and be
held up to Danish businesses as a standard Web services reference
model for secure, reliable and authenticated transactions.

Yet the project has run into a major hurdle in getting its Windows
toolkit, based on .NET 3.0 and Windows Communication Foundation,
to interoperate with its Java toolkit, based on Apache initiatives
like Axis 2.0, Rampart and Sandesha.

"It has proven very difficult to get full interoperability between
these two platforms," Brun said. "It's cost us extra hundreds of
thousands of dollars for something that should have been there out
of the box."

Brun anticipates the interoperability nut will be crack in a few
more weeks, with the challenge of building a good external
registry beyond it.

"We haven't seen any good examples worldwide of registries being
used between organizations," he said.

Yet, despite the difficulty of putting together this sort of
e-commerce network, Brun says the benefits should be massive,
saving the government as much as $265 million with as much as $930
million in savings for private sector users. He said an attempt
earlier in the decade to have VANs handle electronic invoices
proved costly and faced numerous technical obstacles such as
unskilled developers, immature infrastructure, unvalidated
messages and messages sent to non-existing invoices.

All of that from a system that the majority of private businesses
couldn't access.

"Most everyone has the Internet," Brun said.

The governmental approach in Denmark also differs greatly from the
private sector initiatives in the U.S. For instance, the WS-I
profile, which the Danish project will be leveraging, was put
together by user organizations, but hasn't been able to keep up
with the rapidity of changes in the Web services/SOA
marketplace. Brun added that the government has the clout to
create a reference model that the private sector will adopt.

"We're doing what Wal-Mart is doing in the U.S., saying here are
the ways you can interact with us," he said. "Only the government
reaches into more industries."

According to Brun, 10 companies are testing the infrastructure at
this moment and a full pilot will start in March. By October, the
network should be ready to launch. After that he anticipates
expansion into healthcare, records management and corporate tax
reporting.