Introduction

Purpose

Since first becoming a W3C standard in 1998, XML has become a pervasive standard. XML has become the backbone for data exchange and messaging in web services, data feeds, and enterprise application integrations. It is used in application configurations, office documents, and other business data.

This multi-part post will describe the XML’s role in business including standards and business uses, business challenges with XML implementations, and key drivers for successful XML implementations. This post will have a strong business focus, while at times being technical.

Origins of XML

XML is began a subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The extensible nature of XML has allowed it to evolve and meet more needs that originally intended.

The original design goals for XML were:

1. XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
3. XML shall be compatible with SGML.
4. It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
5. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
7. The XML design should be prepared quickly.
8. The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
9. XML documents shall be easy to create.
10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

Reference: Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition)

Common XML Standards

There are literally hundreds of standards built on the XML due its general purpose and extensible nature. Below are a few examples of widely used XML standards

• XRBL has become the standard in the United States for financial reporting
• PIM and SPL are XML based standards for product labeling in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry
• Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML based standard for technical information.
• DocBook is an XML based standard for documentation
• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a specification for exchanging structured information and is the backbone for web services
• XSLT is a widely used transformation language for converting XML from one document format to another (e.g. XML –> XML, XML –> PDF, XML –> WordMl, XML –> Text)
• RSS and ATOM are widely used XML based formats for building data feeds

Business Uses for XML

Let’s take a look at XML from a business perspective. The main areas where XML has been leveraged are:

1. Information/Content Storage: Storing information XML databases (similar to relation databases, only stored in the XML format)
2. Native XML Content Editing: Editing content in an open format that is human readable (unlike for example, the binary Microsoft Word format which requires third party software to edit content)
3. Data Exchange and Messaging (Enterprise application integration): Providing a mechanism for data exchange that is self-describing data and self-contained; Also since XML is hierarchical in structure, it provides the ability the describe complex real world objects and data
4. Publishing information: Improving the accessibility of information through transforming content to meet business presentation requirements 

In the following sections, we’ll take a look at the common challenges and the business drivers associated focusing on these areas.