This standard is an CEN/ISO NWI that specifies requirements for interoperation both within and between
operational environments of manufacturing enterprises.
It defines an interoperability framework and specifies requirements for processes and underpinning metadata that must be in place to establish solutions to various concerns of interoperability (business, processes, services,
data).
It describes the particular requirements of different types of environments (unified, integrated, and federated).

This ISO standard addresses data integration, sharing, exchange, and hand-over between computer systems.
Its purpose is to facilitate integration of data to support the lifecycle activities and processes of production facilities by developping a generic data model and reference data library for process plants.
 
It currently (may 2009) includes the following parts:

• Part 3: Reference data for geometry and topology

XML (Extensible Markup Language (en), « langage de balisage extensible ») est un langage informatique de balisage générique. Le World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), promoteur de standards favorisant l'échange d'informations sur Internet, recommande la syntaxe XML pour exprimer des langages de balisages spécifiques. De nombreux langages respectent la syntaxe XML : XHTML, SVG, XSLT, etc.

La pierre angulaire des activités de standardisation de l'UN/CEFACT est la Spécification Technique des Composants Communs (en anglais : Core Component Technical Specification, CCTS).

Les Composants Communs sont des building-blocks neutres sur le plan de la syntaxe et indépendants technologiquement qui peuvent être utilisés pour la modélisation des données. Les bénéfices majeurs du CCTS sont l'amélioration de la réutilisation des artifacts des données existantes et l'amélioration de l'interopérabilité informatique.

(Wikipedia)

XML Schema, published as a W3C recommendation in May 2001, is one of several XML schema languages. It was the first separate schema language for XML to achieve Recommendation status by the W3C. Like all XML schema languages, XML Schema can be used to express a schema: a set of rules to which an XML document must conform in order to be considered 'valid' according to that schema. However, unlike most other schema languages, XML Schema was also designed with the intent that determination of a document's validity would produce a collection of information adhering to specific data types.

B2MML is an XML implementation of the ANSI/ISA 95 family of standards (ISA95), known internationally as IEC/ISO 62264. B2MML consists of a set of XML schemas written using the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Schema language (XSD) that implement the data models in the ISA95 standard.