Page 25 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

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

government statistical information—called FedStats—with the objective
of using XML to provide this kind of capability.

Similarly, XML could be used to enhance general Web search engines. As
mentioned earlier, the use of data tagging would provide for more precise
searching than current approaches, which are based on relatively crude
quantitative measures, such as the frequency of occurrence of a given
string of text or the proximity of one text string to another. Some
databases have already been developed to take advantage of this feature of
XML. The news agency Reuters, for example, which has archived over
800,000 news stories, used XML tags to classify these into 775 searchable
categories.

Once XML code is written, not only its creators but also external parties
can potentially reuse it. For example, after Amtrak created an XML system
to access its application and database system, the associated data tags and
structures were reused for a voice recognition reservation system.
According to XML experts, additional cost savings may be realized in the
future as well, because it will likely be easy for new systems and
applications to recognize and make use of XML data.

XML’s extensibility also facilitates interaction among a variety of devices.
The same XML document can be interpreted through different style sheets
to suit any number of different display devices. Figure 3 illustrates this
benefit.

Page 21 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government