Page 37 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Chapter 2: A Comprehensive Set of Standards
Chapter 2: A Comprehensive Set of Standards
for Implementing XML Is Only Partially in
Place
for Implementing XML Is Only Partially in

Place

Key technical standards for XML have been largely worked out under the
auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These technical
standards are focused on providing the generic structure and tools to tag
data, transmit it over the Internet, and allow it to be processed by the
computer systems that receive it.

Business standards, though equally important, are generally less well-
developed, and reaching agreement on them is proving to be difficult when
multiple communities of interest are involved. Business standards are
needed to provide a more complete framework for conducting business
over the Internet, including advertising products and services so that
potential buyers and sellers can find each other, proposing and agreeing
upon electronic transactions, and executing the agreed-upon transactions.

Business standards are also needed to define vocabularies for the specific
data elements that are to be exchanged when transactions are conducted.
These vocabularies, once fully developed, may also be useful to the
government in certain cases. However, many of these potentially useful
standard vocabularies are still in the initial stages of development and do
not provide all the data structures needed to support current government
needs.

XML Technical The W3C organization has completed development of a suite of core
technical standards for XML, as well as a number of functional extensions.
Standards Have As table 4 shows, a number of core technical standards have been
1
Largely Been Defined approved as official “recommendations” by the W3C. In addition, various
functional extensions are currently in development, such as XPointer,
which defines how individual parts of a document are addressed; XQuery,
which is a language for retrieving and interpreting information from
diverse sources; and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), which allows
software programs to access and communicate with each other over a
network such as the Internet.

1
In the terminology used by the W3C, a standard is finalized when it is formally approved
as a “recommendation.” Earlier versions are termed working drafts, candidate
recommendations, and proposed recommendations.

Page 33 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government