Page 10 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Executive Summary

Principal Findings

A Complete Set of Key technical standards for XML have been largely worked out under the
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Standards for auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These technical
Implementing XML Is Only standards are focused on providing the generic structure and tools to tag
data, transmit it over the Internet, and allow it to be processed by the
Partially in Place
computer systems that receive it.

Business standards, though equally important, are generally less well-
developed, and reaching agreement on them is proving to be difficult when
multiple communities of interest are involved. Business standards are
needed to provide a more complete framework for conducting business
over the Internet, including advertising products and services so that
potential buyers and sellers can find each other, proposing and agreeing
upon electronic transactions, and executing the agreed-upon transactions.
Business standards are also needed to define vocabularies for the specific
data elements that are to be exchanged when these transactions are
conducted.

Unlike XML technical standards, which are all established and maintained
by the W3C, business standards are developed by a variety of public and
private sector organizations, including industry consortia, and are not
always universally supported. For example, a number of different
approaches to addressing the process of conducting business transactions
have been proposed, including electronic business XML (ebXML),
RosettaNet, and XML-based Web services. These different approaches
continue to vie for support and offer functionality that is in part
overlapping and incompatible. Because uncertainty remains about which
business standards will ultimately prevail, applications based on any of the
current proposals may be at risk of being incompatible with future
standards. In addition, without universally accepted standards,
commercial IT vendors may be using XML extensions that are nonstandard
and divergent and that may limit interoperability.

In industries and professions where needs are well-defined and cohesive
communities of interest exist, standard data vocabularies have been

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The W3C was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, to lead
development of common protocols that promote the evolution of the Web and ensure
interoperability.

Page 6 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government