Page 31 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language
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Chapter 1: Background: Features and Current
Federal Use of XML
of interest. Specifically, the Department of Justice has developed a set of
definitions for basic data elements shared by several law enforcement
information networks. Similarly, EPA has been working with state
environmental agencies to develop XML data standards for a national
network of environmental information. Several efforts are also under way
within DOD to develop a common infrastructure to support the use of
XML across the department.
Securities and Exchange In the SEC’s case, agency officials made the decision to design their
Commission modernized EDGAR system to use XML for all external data exchanges as
well as internal processing. However, as it is currently operating, EDGAR
continues to use other more commonly known document formats because
many external systems that interact with EDGAR are not yet XML-
compliant.
According to agency officials, since 1992, the SEC has used EDGAR to
electronically collect the financial and other business information that
public companies are required by law to submit on a regular basis. As part
of a larger modernization effort, the SEC in April 2001 began requiring that
submissions be formatted with headers encoded in XML. The agency’s
EDGARLink client software, distributed to filers at no charge, uses a
specialized vocabulary called the Extensible Forms Description Language
to format headers in XML for transmission to the SEC. Although SEC
officials have not quantified any cost savings associated with
implementing XML, they believe its use has saved the agency software
development expenses, because filers now use a commercial off-the-shelf
product to format their submissions, instead of custom software, as had
been previously required. According to SEC officials, third-party software
developers should also be able to reduce costs by using commercial XML
products to format submissions.
SEC officials stated that their use of XML to date has been limited to
functions that did not require coordination with other government or
private sector organizations. Because the SEC provides filers with copies
of the XML-formatting software at no charge, it has been able to fully
control how XML is implemented in the software and what specific
vocabulary is used. The Extensible Forms Description Language that was
used has been submitted to the W3C as a proposed standard but has not
yet been approved.
SEC officials would like to broaden the use of XML to cover all the data in
EDGAR filings rather than just header information. Doing so would take
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