An industry's ability to use electronic commerce (EC) effectively depends primarily on that industry's ability to create, manipulate and transmit intelligent information among partners and throughout the industry.  The eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is already targeted as the enabling technology for EC, is the primary standard by which industries are defining the structure and semantics of their information.  XML is a base recommendation coupled with a set of emerging specifications and related "vocabularies" based upon the XML syntax.

In the simplest sense, the benefits of XML will only be achieved if organizations of a significant number are using the same XML documents.  Therefore, these XML documents must be available for partners to discover and retrieve. A registry/repository is a mechanism used to discover and retrieve documents, templates, software (i.e., objects and resources) over the Internet. A registry is the mechanism used to discover the object.  The registry provides information about the object, including the location of the object.  A repository is where the object resides.  A user retrieves an object from a repository.

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NIST is an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department

SDCT is a division of the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at NIST.