Page 46 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

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

develop taxonomies (common vocabulary) for financial reporting across
jurisdictions (e.g., United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Germany)
and taxonomies for specific industries (e.g., mutual funds, media and
entertainment, and agriculture). As of this writing, the consortium has
completed an XBRL specification for financial statements and a taxonomy
for financial reporting of commercial and industrial companies that reflect
the generally accepted accounting principles used in the United States.
However, work on the other specifications and taxonomies has not been
completed, and existing taxonomies for different communities of interest
are not completely compatible.

Legal XML is being developed by a nonprofit organization of the same
name, made up of volunteers from private industry, nonprofit
organizations, government, and academia. The organization seeks to
coordinate activities in both the “vertical” and “horizontal” domains of the
legal profession. Vertical domains include court filings, transcripts, judicial
decisions, and public law. Horizontal domains include general vocabulary
and logical document structure. As of this writing, no standards have been
completed.

The fact that many of these vocabularies are still in the early stages of
development creates challenges for reaching agreement on their use for
governmentwide or cross-agency functions. Accordingly, the
governmentwide benefits that may be derived from using these standards
will not be available in the near term. An apt example is the Human
Resources Data Network, being developed by an interagency workgroup
to capture essential workforce information to meet the needs of the Office
of Personnel Management and other agencies. The planned network is
intended to (1) replace the paper-based official personnel folders that are
currently used to document pay, benefits, and work history of civilian
employees, and (2) serve as a gateway to streamline the process by which
agencies provide workforce information to the Office of Personnel
Management. According to project officials, the workgroup would like to
use commercial standards such as HR-XML to implement the planned
network, and officials contacted the HR-XML consortium to assess the
applicability of the standard. However, the HR-XML standard is still in
early stages of development, with only two approved data definitions (for
name and address) currently available. In contrast, the workgroup has
completed a data modeling exercise that identified the need to define 984
critical data elements. Unable to wait for commercial standards to be
developed, the workgroup defined its own data structure and vocabulary.
Project officials noted that even if a fully developed HR-XML vocabulary
were available, some of the data elements required by the Human

Page 42 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government