InfoGlide Corporation announced the availability of its XML Similarity Engine for cross-consortia and industry data exchange. The patented XML Similarity Engine is technology that offers cross-industry, B2B integration of software solutions. In the recent past, B2B firms have been forced to choose between BizTalk, OASIS, RosettaNet, ACORD and other leading industry consortia to enable interoperable XML applications. According to InfoGlide, XML was intended to solve many of these interoperability issues for data. However, XML has not been able, until today, to solve two critical data problems left over from the 1970’s: schemas in unlike formats and “dirty” or imperfect data. Neither XML nor the standards imposed by these consortia can bridge the two key barriers to applications working together. While XML enables data segments across different databases to be shared, what the XML Similarity Engine does differently is share entire databases for all common data segments, presented in an untransformed data model. Because the databases do not have to undergo any transformation, they retain all their richness and context. The XML Similarity Engine does not alter the source database or database structures. The XML Similarity Engine gives immediate results while consortia-imposed standards focus only on exchanging data in a very painful and limiting manner. For example, B2B applications must use XML documents with virtually identical schemas or file layouts, or they will not interoperate. For instance, a purchase order from one firm cannot “talk to” a bill-of-materials from another because they have completely different formats. XML cannot solve this problem so the industry has been looking to consortia to develop models and rules as standards, or worse, a rigid transformation technology is required. With InfoGlide’s XML Similarity Engine, companies are freed from the need to painfully model their data independently, or through a consortium. Now they can just use the data and schemas as they exist in their industries-and these can easily communicate with any other XML schema in any other industry. InfoGlide’s patented XML Similarity Engine also enables legacy databases to be fully accessible to XML applications without any data conversion. Any relational, flat file, or hierarchical structure becomes XML enabled through use of the XML Similarity Engine. www.infoglide.com