Feds Uncertain About XML

XML, formally known as the Extensible Markup Language, is an outgrowth of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet makes it easy for users to transmit data from one computer to another, but the second computer often finds it impossible to use the transmitted data.

The World Wide Web Consortium, Geneva, developed XML to provide a set of rules for developing hidden “tags” to describe all of the many different types of information stored in a computer. One tag might identify the number “75,000″ as the number of subscribers of a health insurance plan, while another tag might describe “75,000″ as the annual salary of a corporate manager.

Developers of the Electronic Data Interchange standards had similar goals, but use of EDI standards is limited, because EDI communications depends on customized, proprietary software and expensive, private communications networks, McClure writes.

The Web consortium has succeeded at setting the technical standards needed to implement XML, but “business standards, though equally important, are generally less well-developed,” McClure writes. “Reaching agreement on them is proving to be difficult.”

McClure cites the HR-XML Consortium Inc., Raleigh, N.C., as an example of an XML standards success story. The consortium has developed several sets of standards for exchanging employee identity information, job information and benefits enrollment information.

A second organization, which is not named in the report, the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development, Pearl River, N.Y., has taken the lead in developing XML standards for the life insurance, annuity and property-casualty insurance industries.