Page 48 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Chapter 3: The Federal Government Faces
Chapter 3: The Federal Government Faces
Challenges in Realizing XML’s Full Potential
Challenges in Realizing XML’s Full Potential

Although XML offers the potential to greatly facilitate the identification,
integration, and processing of complex information, a number of
challenges face the federal government as it attempts to take best
advantage of the technology’s potential. XML system developers—both
within the federal government and externally—must avoid several critical
pitfalls when implementing XML, including the risk that data will not be
adequately defined and that incompatible data definitions, vocabularies,
and structures will proliferate; the potential for proprietary extensions to
be built that would defeat XML’s goal of broad interoperability; and the
need to maintain adequate security.

In addition to these pitfalls, which all systems developers must address,
the federal government faces additional challenges as it attempts to gain
the most from XML’s potential. Specifically, (1) no identifiable
governmentwide strategy for XML adoption exists to guide agency
implementation efforts and ensure that agency enterprise architectures
address adoption of XML. Without agreement on such a strategy, agencies
risk building and buying systems that will not work with each other in the
future. (2) The needs of federal agencies have not been uniformly
identified and consolidated so that they can be represented effectively
before key standards-setting bodies. If federal requirements are not better
understood and consolidated, the government may be unable to effectively
provide input to commercial standards while they are still under
development. (3) Although work has begun on a pilot, the government has
not yet fully implemented a registry of government-unique XML data
structures (such as data element tags) that system developers can consult
when building or modifying XML-based systems. (4) Much also needs to be
done to ensure that agencies address XML implementation through
enterprise architectures so that they can maximize its benefits and
forestall costly future reworking of their systems.

Implementing XML Although XML offers the potential to greatly facilitate the identification,
integration, and processing of complex information—both within the
Presents Pitfalls federal government and externally—system developers face a number of
pitfalls in implementing the technology, including the risk that markup
languages, tags, DTDs, and schemas will proliferate; the potential for
proprietary extensions to be built that would defeat XML’s goal of broad
interoperability; and the need to maintain adequate security. Regarding the
risk that redundant markup languages, tags, DTDs, and schemas will
proliferate, past experience with data interchange has shown that even if a
specification such as the XML standard is as complete as possible,
individual implementations can vary tremendously. As a result, it is

Page 44 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government