Vocabulary issues are central to XML-based e-commerce standards. The rapid increase in the number of XML standards has made the vocabulary issues a critical area of XML applications. This paper reports the result from a study of the vocabulary use in XML standards. Choosing five DTDs from the financial and capital markets domain, we examined a total of 1346 elements in nine categories. Inconsistent naming conventions and varying practices were major problems among other findings. We also observed a number of linguistic and semantic patterns in element names. Such patterns show a potential to serve as a foundation for building ontology-based conceptual models for XML schemas. The authors propose an ontology-driven, dynamic coordination approach in developing schema elements.