Target Audience: Manager, Software Engineer, Systems Analyst, Marketer

Level of Session: Beginner, Intermediate

Multi-lingual support is emerging as a key requirement associated with the growth of the E-Commerce market. A lot of emphasis has been placed on XML as the new "savior" of E-Commerce. Unicode provides a foundation on which to build multi-lingual support. But the two alone do not provide a complete solution.

This paper describes an approach for providing an end-to-end multi-lingual solution in the E-Commerce environment, where a variety of operating systems, data types and application environments is the norm. An approach to integrating the multitude of technologies currently used to implement E-Commerce will be described. This will include Unicode, XML, Java, Sybase multi-lingual support, object management servers, and other technologies. Particular emphasis will be placed on:

- preserving data integrity
- maintaining data portability
- maintaining cultural context
- keeping an "Open System" open
- flexible objects for cross-cultural business rules
- data canonicalization for ease of processing
- rules for "culturally correct" XML tagging and protocol headers
- bringing legacy data to the new millennium