Page 18 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Chapter 1: Background: Features and Current
Federal Use of XML

criminal convictions, tax payments, and others. In today’s environment,
each of these systems could be operated by a different entity and could
use incompatible systems software and computer applications, which
could cause data-sharing problems. One solution would be to tag data in a
standard way so that it could be easily shared among all these systems and
databases.

Standardized tagging helps solve the problem by formatting both the data
and relevant information about the data according to a standard that can
be readily interpreted by any other system that recognizes that format and
understands the data definitions and structures that are used. In our
example, each state agency may have relevant information about a drivers’
license applicant stored in a different format. The applicant’s name might
be called “Name” in one system but divided into “Lastname,” “Firstname,”
and “MiddleInitial” in another system. Further, the database system
software running at each agency might use different commands and
programming syntax to access and query its databases, requiring that any
system wanting to connect and access its data conform to that agency’s
unique structures. However, if the data were made available to other
organizations using a standardized tagged format, these agency-unique
discrepancies could be overcome. All name information, for example,
might be consistently tagged as <Name>. Even if it did not use this
standard tag internally, each state agency would be responsible for
matching up its internal data structures to the appropriate standard data
tags, which would have agreed-upon definitions. The standard tags would
make it easy to connect to each agency and exchange relevant
information, because each exchange would use the same format to
transfer the data and annotate (tag) what it means. Of course, polices and
procedures would still be needed to ensure that the data were exchanged
only for authorized purposes, and each system would have to conform to
the standards in use and agree on standard data definitions and structures.

Figure 1 shows the role that a set of tagging standards such as XML could
play in facilitating data sharing among disparate agencies.

Page 14 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government