Page 24 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

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

In addition to the supplemental technical standards already discussed,
XML can accommodate extensions to suit the needs of specific
communities of users, such as chemists, travel agents, and numerous
others. As a result, many efforts are under way to define specialized tags
and other XML data structures and processing protocols to suit a variety of
specific business purposes. For example:

• Electronic business XML (ebXML) is being developed as a complete,
modular suite of specifications to enable the conduct of business over the
Internet.
• Mathematicians have created an extension of XML, 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. The W3C has approved the
Mathematical Markup Language as a standard.
• The HR-XML Consortium, an industry coalition, is developing XML
vocabulary and data structures to meet the needs of the human capital
field, including such functions as exchange of staffing data and payroll
transactions.
• The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) was developed by a
consortium of industry and public sector organizations as a standard for
reporting and analysis of financial information.

XML Can Enhance If widely implemented using consistent data definitions, XML can be a very
effective tool to facilitate searching for, identifying, and integrating
Information Search, information from different and perhaps unfamiliar sources. For example,
Retrieval, and because XML uses data tags (as discussed earlier), it can be used for more
precise data queries and collections, both locally (for a specific
Analysis organization) and across the Internet. XML’s data tags can be used to
precisely identify individual data elements, allowing XML-based systems to
collect and integrate specific types of data relatively easily from a variety
of sources and create reports or support other kinds of analysis that
otherwise might require a much more labor-intensive effort. For example,
the federal government annually produces many reports with large
amounts of tabular data, such as cost figures and other numerical
statistics. If tagged in XML using agreed-upon data definitions, specific
data elements could be located within these tables, retrieved, and
recombined to form a new kind of analysis. In fact, the data could be
dynamically retrieved each time the analysis was examined, if up-to-the
minute information were desired. Officials from the EPA and other federal
agencies are currently working on a centralized Web site for federal

Page 20 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government