BMEcat Standard of Product Catalogue Exchange

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Computer Science - Applied grade: 17 Pforzheim University (Pforzheim Graduate School) course: Informationstechnologie I language: English abstract: In electronic catalogue interchange we have more than 160 different standards to support the catalogue exchange. BMEcat is one of the most important exchange standards in Europe. BMEcat is an open source XML based standard developed by the BME Fraunhofer Institute University of Essen and Linz to support the supplier - customer business in the industry. The special in BMEcat is the wide range of supported branches. So it is possible for a company to have a look on all needed products and services to run the business not only the production related. In 2004 we are preparing for version 2.0 with the integration of openTRANS as a document interchange standard. The paper describes the working system and the structure of the standard; comparing it to other solutions and showing up some experiences of users. Finally we sketch the future of BMEcat.