An Introduction to MTML

What is MTML?

The Marine Trading Markup Language (MTML) is designed to use the Internet to greatly facilitate trading in the maritime industry. MTML utilizes the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to encode marine trading transactions in a way that both computers and people can readily understand.

Why use XML?

Unlike HTML, the language that is the Internet’s foundation for the display of information to people, XML enables the precise exchange of information over the Internet between computer systems, particularly those of trading partners. Using XML and the Internet eliminates the need for custom interfaces and expensive value-added networks (VAN) between a company’s business systems and those of each of its trading partners. This greatly reduces development and maintenance costs, and makes electronic trading affordable for a much wider base of small and medium size business partners than did past standardization efforts such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).

No complex or costly EDI messaging software or translators are required. Since XML files are human readable, they can even be created and edited on a personal computer and exchanged via electronic mail. They can also be viewed using industry standard Web browsers. These browsers validate some elements of the content, helping to reduce costly data entry errors.

If business systems utilize a commercial relational database, an interface can be developed to exchange data in XML in a few days, rather than the many weeks or months required either for EDI or other custom integration efforts. As an indication of the value of these benefits, XML has been embraced for application integration by numerous major computing vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle, SAP, Great Plains and Sun.