Bowstreet delivered a universal directory service language for the Internet to three key Internet standards bodies. This language, called Directory Services Markup Language (DSML), is supported by the collective efforts of IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and the Sun-Netscape Alliance. By helping establish directories as the infrastructure for e-commerce applications, DSML enables easy sharing of valuable business data and processes within and across company boundaries. DSML will also accelerate the industry shift toward business-to-business applications built on Web services, modular units of software functionality located anywhere on the Internet. DSML and Web services will enable companies to develop dynamic e-commerce Web sites that can uniquely meet the needs of a company’s customers and business partners. The DSML 1.0 specification submission enables different vendors’ directory services to work together more easily by describing their contents – including data about people and computing resources – in XML. The announcement keeps the working group’s July 12 promise to reach consensus on a draft standard this year. The six companies turned over the DSML 1.0 specification draft to OASIS. In an effort to gain rapid and widespread acceptance, DSML 1.0 information is also being provided to the W3C and BizTalk. The DSML effort builds upon Bowstreet’s work over the past two years on the Bowstreet Web Automation Factory, a system for dynamically creating, managing, and linking mass-customized Web sites for B2B e-commerce. www.dsml.org, www.bowstreet.com