The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in the popularity and adoption of XML, the eXtensible Markup Language. This explosive growth is driven by its ability to provide a standardized, extensible means of including semantic information within documents describing semi-structured data. This makes it possible to address the shortcomings of existing markup languages such as HTML and support data exchange in e-business environments.

Dynamic Web pages, where the data resides in a backend database and is served using predefined templates, reduce the coupling between the data and its representation. However, the semantics of the data can still be confusing when exchanging information in an e-business environment. A particular item could be represented using different names (in the simplest case) in two systems in a business-to-business transaction. This enforces adherence to complex, often proprietary, document standards.