Page 11 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language
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Executive Summary
successfully developed. For example, mathematicians have created an
XML vocabulary called the Mathematical Markup Language that allows
them to insert equations into Web pages that can then be copied into
specialized software applications and immediately used for calculations.
Some of these vocabularies, once fully developed, may be useful to the
government as well. However, many of these potentially useful standard
vocabularies are still in the initial stages of development and do not
provide all the data structures needed to support current needs. Using
them at this time would mean taking the risk that future developments
could diverge from these early standards and limit interoperability with
them. As a result, they are not yet ready for governmentwide adoption.
The Federal Government Although XML offers the potential to greatly facilitate the identification,
Faces Challenges in integration, and processing of complex information—both within the
Realizing XML’s Full federal government and externally—system developers face a number of
pitfalls in implementing the technology. One risk is that markup languages,
Potential
data definitions, and data structures will proliferate. If organizations
develop their systems using unique, nonstandard data definitions and
structures, they will be unable to share their data externally without
providing additional instructions to translate data structures from one
organization and system to another, thus defeating one of XML’s major
benefits. Likewise, software vendors and system developers may be
tempted to add proprietary extensions to the XML standards when they
build specific systems. Such systems might then be less able to freely
exchange information with other XML-enabled systems. In addition,
implementing XML in an organization could create new security
vulnerabilities if steps are not taken in designing the system to mitigate
this risk.
In addition to these pitfalls, which all systems developers must address,
the federal government faces additional challenges as it attempts to gain
the most from XML’s potential. Specifically:
To date, neither OMB, which is responsible for developing and overseeing
governmentwide policies and guidelines for agency IT management, nor
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is
responsible for developing federal information processing standards and
guidelines, have formulated an explicit governmentwide strategy for XML
adoption to guide agency implementation efforts and ensure that agency
enterprise architectures address incorporation of XML. Activities within
the federal government to promote broad governmentwide adoption of
XML technology have been limited. Most governmentwide coordination
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