DESCRIBE PRODUCTS USING THE OPEN CATALOG FORMAT Many organizations build themselves around the production, sale, and, ultimately, the delivery of products. The ability to understand the products offered by vendors and to describe your own products to your customers is an important aspect of the business-to-business supply chain. One company, MartSoft, Inc., aims to solve many of the issues with sharing catalogs by developing two complementary standards, the Open Catalog Format (OCF) and the Open Catalog Protocol (OCP). http://clickthru.online.com/Click?q=ec-MHyXQVyT37XGul11k53_boGhGKuR CATALOGS According to MartSoft, a catalog is simply information about a set of products. Because catalogs are so prevalent, there's no need to describe what they are; however, understanding the characteristics and theory behind catalogs is more complicated. Essentially, catalogs are comprised of products, and products are comprised of attributes (or traits) that describe the product. Products are arranged within catalogs in a variety of ways, including in flat structures with no categorization or in highly defined structures with multiple layers of categories. The root element of the OCF XML document is the element. This tag is the container of all main categories in a product catalog. There can be multiple parameters, categories, and products inside a element. Parameters specify information about the catalog itself. Within the element are the top-level categories in the product catalog. Products in the element are top-level products that do not belong to any particular category. CATEGORIES The OCF XML document is built by assembling a hierarchy of categories and subcategories and their associated products. Within OCF, a category is more than just a hierarchical structure; the category defines a template of attributes that are shared by the products in the category. The element defines categories, and each element contains an XML attribute called name that identifies the category. Within the element are attributes, parameters, links, products, and categories. Attributes describe the template of characteristics defined by subsequent products. Parameters, like the element, describe information about the particular category. Links allow the catalog to link to other catalog descriptions within the same catalog or in other catalogs using the OCP. Links specify such things as product associations and cross-sells. Products are the actual product listings for the category, and categories listed in a element are subcategories. SUBCATEGORIES Subcategories are elements embedded, or contained, in other elements. The relationship between elements as containers and the contained elements forms the structure of the product catalog hierarchy. Each subsequent element becomes a new subcategory. But more importantly, each subcategory's products still exhibit the attributes from the upper-level categories. For example, the category "books" might contain attributes such as ISBN Number and Author. A subcategory under books, called "Biography," might have an attribute called "Subject." Another subcategory under books, called "Science," might have an attribute called "Discipline." Any products defined in the Biography category must have an ISBN Number, an Author, and a Subject, while products in the Science category will have an ISBN Number, an Author, and a Discipline. PRODUCTS A product is an item in a catalog. Attributes, parameters, links, and the product's location within the categorical hierarchy define each product. As with the other elements, the attributes within the element describe information about the product. The elements within each element are not arbitrary, however. They are the attributes that are defined by the categories and supercategories in which the product is contained. The elements within the element describe various things about the product, which are not necessarily a part of the product's categorization. In fact, some parameter values convey a special meaning when the catalog is processed. For example, a parameter that begins with "s-" is typically a server-side parameter. SUMMARY The ability to describe and share catalogs is extremely important in streamlining the supply chain for business-to-business transactions. The OCF is a common language used to distribute catalogs to customers and to understand the products provided by vendors. To find out more about the OCF and the OCP, visit MartSoft's OCP Web site. http://clickthru.online.com/Click?q=02-qia9IljcNSHD_mz_XDdyr_zpb4ZR Brian Schaffner is a senior consultant for Fujitsu Consulting. He provides architecture, design, and development support for Fujitsu's Telcom360 group. VISUAL STUDIO.NET DEBUTS Microsoft's launch of Visual Studio.NET (VS.NET) marks the beginning of .NET, the company's initiative to incorporate XML-enabled software and Web services. To learn more about this much-hyped technology from a development standpoint, visit Tech Update's special report. http://clickthru.online.com/Click?q=17-agitI5X-eG9d4G4IzyZ3RTj37RsR ----------------------------------------