Page 59 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

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

commercial registries do not meet the users’ requirements. With a registry
in place, agencies could start using registered XML components, and de
facto XML standards would thus begin to emerge within specific
communities of interest. Under these circumstances, the CIO Council or
OMB would be in a better position to define specific governmentwide
standards at a later time, based in part on this activity.

However, a government XML registry will be effective in supporting
systems interoperability among federal agencies only if governmentwide
policies are set, guidelines established, and a defined management and
funding process put in place to operate the registry. Work on defining
exactly how an operational governmentwide registry—and the data
repositories associated with it—should be administered and maintained is
not yet complete. The XML Working Group has recently established a
subgroup to define registry-related policies and procedures. However, it
has not yet defined a management process that specifies (1) who is
allowed to register new XML components, (2) how input to the registry is
to be verified, (3) to what extent developers will be required to consult the
registry when building new XML data structures, (4) classes of compliance
for categorizing how rigorously organizations adhere to the standard data
structures and definitions, or (5) a configuration management process to
keep track of successive versions of each registered component. Members
of the group drafted an XML Developer’s Guide in December 2001 that
includes a proposed requirement that agency XML developers make use of
the federal registry, but the draft guide has not yet been approved and
adopted.

Standard conventions for using XML’s namespace feature and other rules
for naming data elements, DTDs, and schemas in a consistent and
unambiguous way have not yet been defined for the pilot registry. Without
such a naming structure, different XML documents may use the same data
tags for different definitions and structures. A standard use of the
namespace feature would allow the tags in any given XML document to be
traced back unambiguously to their proper definitions.

The registry’s management framework would also need to include
definitions of different classes of compliance with the registry’s data
structures. In some cases, individual agency implementations may not
need to be integrated with other government systems, and agencies may
have compelling reasons to develop nonstandard data structures. The
establishment of different classes of compliance would define how loosely
or tightly an XML implementation would be connected to the registry and
would outline the operational implications associated with each class.

Page 55 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government