Page 3 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Federal Government Needs Have Not Been Consolidated for Input
to Standards-Setting Bodies 50
XML Interoperability across the Government Depends on an
Effective Cross-Agency Registry 52
XML Implementations Can Be More Effective within the Context of
an Enterprise Architecture 56

Chapter 4 Conclusions and Recommendations 58

Conclusions 58
Recommendations for Executive Action 60
Agency Comments and Our Evaluation 61

Appendix I Comments from the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration 62

Appendix II Comments from the National Archives and
Records Administration 64

Glossary 65

Tables

Table 1: Comparison of HTML and XML 17
Table 2: Basic XML Components 18
Table 3: Comparison of EDI and XML 26
Table 4: XML Technical Standards as of February 2002 34
Table 5: Representative Industry-Specific XML Vocabularies 36
Table 6: Strengths and Pitfalls of XML 46

Figures

Figure 1: A Hypothetical XML-Based State Driver’s License
System 15
Figure 2: XML Code Example 16
Figure 3: XML Can Facilitate the Use of Different User Interfaces
and Display Devices 22

Page ii GAO-02-327 Electronic Government