XML. Some say it's the future of the web. Others say it's merely plumbing behind it.
But it's already in use at refineries, hospitals, courtrooms, even in space. And while the average
Internet user may still know nothing of it, IT specialists and web designers who say the
same may be dangerously out of touch. What is XML? How does it work? And what can it
do for you? We'll find out.
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. Like HTML, XML uses tags, basically words
or letters in angle brackets to add more information to a document. If you view the HTML source
code behind a web page, you'll see that the tags indicate how the page should look. These
tags, for instance, indicate that the word between them, OASIS, should appear in bold
face text. But XML has a different purpose. It doesn't define the look. It defines the
content. That means that data, whether it be a birth date, a street address or zip code,
is defined as such by its surrounding tags, which are written in plain human readable
text.
What XML allows you to do is to take a data object and encode it in text, letters that
people can read, and ship it across the network and have somebody else at the other end of
the network receive it and decode it and get the same data object back. That's all there
is to it. XML is a way of making sure the meaning stays in the data until the last person
has had to use it.
In fact, XML is already in use all over the web. Many of the most popular and visible
websites like Amazon.com, eBay and AOL are already using XML to transfer data behind
the scenes.
The end user, of course, doesn't see the XML. The end user just sees the web pages that
come out of this process. But the kind of flexibility and generality and efficiency
that you get behind the scenes in that kind of website wouldn't be possible without deploying
XML technology.
If you go on the internet looking for XML, that's a little bit like getting into your
car and expecting to see the fuel moving through the engine. XML has that sort of role. It's
part of the infrastructure rather than part of what you see. But be assured, you're already
using vast amounts of XML.
Because XML tags are written in plain English rather than in a proprietary binary code of
ones and zeros, XML encoded documents can be read with any simple text editor. And XML's
platform independent data format enables documents to be read anywhere, on any computer, with
any operating system.
XML does the same sort of thing for data as Java did for computer programs. Java technology
opens up computer programming. It means you can have computer programs that run on any
computer without you having to ask any questions first. Java makes your programs portable.
XML makes your data portable.
This flexibility means that information encoded in XML potentially has a much longer lifespan.
Information is valuable stuff. The enterprise, the business enterprise of today is built
around information.
As co-author of the XML specification, Tim Bray understands the need for an open standard
like XML.
How many people really believe they're going to be using the same word processor five years
from now than they are today? Nobody. That's not how it works. But information lasts longer
than that. In general, information lasts longer than computers do.
And yet, we're taking the entire storehouse of intellectual capital and locking it up
in fragile, proprietary, binary, short-lived vendors, word processor files. Well, this
is just nuts. It's bad business.
Computer experts believe that XML is the answer to that problem.
XML helps with our capability there because it's human readable text. So you're not going
to need to pull out a specific software program to use it 50 or 100 years from now if you're
going through the old census records and they're all in XML.
David Meginson is an independent computer consultant. He counsels clients about XML
and sees its potential in helping businesses communicate.
I think business to business data exchange is one place where XML makes an awful lot
of sense. When you read about big mergers, I mean multi-billion dollar mergers that fail,
you read the postmortems three or four years later, one of the most frequent reasons for
failure is incompatible data systems. XML stepped into the breach and gave us the first
step towards solving this problem.
When we return, we'll take a look at one XML initiative in B2B data exchange that's greasing
the wheels of commerce in the petrochemical industry.
XML is the nirvana that everyone's been promising for years with EDI.
With manufacturing plants throughout the world, Ethel Corporation develops, tests, and manufactures
lubricant and fuel additives for some of the world's largest motor oil producers.
As vice president of product supply at Ethel, Russell Gottwald oversees production from
the purchase of raw materials to delivery of the final product.
A key objective of mine, a primary area of focus is on on-time delivery, quality delivery.
The number one cause that we have right now on non-conformance is documentation. Documentation
errors can occur very simply. For instance, if the customer calls in a purchase order,
our customer service rep takes that phone call and keys in that order. Then we turn
around and we fax that information to a logistics provider, a shipping firm, for instance. They
take the fax, they key it in manually into their system. Then it goes from there into
the government. So every time someone re-enters the same data, there's that opportunity for
human error. Human error that can be avoided with XML.
Virtually across the street from Ethel's Richmond, Virginia headquarters is Envera Corporation,
an XML-based internet clearinghouse for B2B transactions in the petrochemical industry.
Envera is really about solving all of your supply chain issues, your logistics, what
we call deep ERP integration. As soon as you know you need a product, your suppliers know
they need to produce a raw material and get it to you on time in order for you to produce
that product. At Ethel's flagship plant in Houston, Texas,
raw materials are shipped in by train and stored here on these tracks until they're
needed. One of Envera's promises is that it can help reduce the quantity of inventory
kept on hand and the amount of time it sits unused.
By having the XML platform, we will be in touch all the way from the customer service
rep who receives the order straight through to the loading dock and therefore we'll be
able to impact our inventories tremendously. Our lead time performance will improve. Customers
will be happier. Before signing on as vice president of membership
at Envera, Rich Schiavola worked as global business manager for fuel additives at Ethel.
So he understands the frustration the company felt in trying to perform EDI, electronic
data interchange. EDI gave a lot of promise but was unable
to deliver what we believe XML and companies like Envera can deliver to companies today.
Envera provides total connectivity, connecting its 40 member companies over the internet
with their supply chain members, customers and third party service providers like banks
and shipping companies. That's the first benefit, total connectivity.
The second benefit is really adding speed and efficiency to your overall transaction.
Unfortunately it's not that easy when you make a sale in the chemical industry. There
is anywhere from 12 to 16 different documents that have to transfer between our two companies
after we make the sale. The material safety data sheet, the quality
metrics, the shipping information, all the way down to the invoice. All of these sorts
of things that today are done by telephones and faxes and snail mail can be done by the
internet. And that saves real money. Traditionally the
cost of processing those documents at Ethel has ranged anywhere from $50 to $230 per transaction.
With Envera, that cost has fallen almost 80% to an average of $8 to $10 per transaction.
And all of this is made possible thanks to XML. XML is definitely the way to go. It's
a universal language. E-business and XML go hand in hand.
In fact, the United Nations is promoting an international initiative called EBXML or Electronic
Business XML. We're supporting this initiative because we
believe that the products of the initiative will allow not only small and medium-sized
enterprises to be involved in global trade but also developing countries. We think it
is very important that given the enormous potential of XML that all countries and all
sizes of companies are involved in the project. More information about EBXML can be found
on XML.org. Here you can also find reference to the many hundreds of XML-based languages
that are currently under development. Everything from Cold Fusion XML to Purchase Order XML.
Almost certainly in the industry that you're involved with, there will be people at work
who are defining an XML vocabulary for the data that you tend to pass around. If there's
not people doing that, that's another huge opportunity for you to go now to XML.org and
propose a vocabulary for your industry. And many companies are doing just that. Kaiser
Permanente, the largest non-profit HMO in the United States, is leading the charge to
incorporate XML into healthcare. Dr. Bob Dolan is a hospital-based internist, but he spends
two-thirds of his time working on information technology. What a blend, I'm telling you.
Sometimes I go to these standards meetings and you're trying to build consensus and what
a relief to just come back and just be a doctor sometimes. I tell you. Kaiser Permanente is
using XML in a number of ways. It's already made its clinical practice guidelines available
to doctors in XML, and it's now working on incorporating XML into clinical notes. Clinical
notes are those documents like a progress report or a discharge summary that a doctor
may dictate into a patient's record. The hope is that by encoding these in XML, hospital
computers will be better able to understand the contents. And the more the computer can
understand what's in a clinical note, the more we've enabled automatic decision support
so that the computer can look into my note and say, hey, you're prescribing penicillin.
Don't you know that penicillin, this patient's allergic to penicillin? The future of healthcare
will definitely be influenced by XML. Paul Byron is an XML business analyst with Kaiser
Permanente. He believes that in addition to providing automatic decision support for doctors,
XML will also help to safeguard patient records. When you start thinking about encoding patient
data in electronic form, the longevity of the data becomes very important. Having the
data stored in a text format is going to be one of the most important things about XML
for healthcare. And of course, one goal of XML in any industry is to make information
portable. That means doctors will have more access to medical records when they most need
them, and this could potentially save lives. They will have access to that information
and can make the clinical decisions based on a more accurate record of the patient's
background. That will have a significant impact, and XML will be largely involved in that.
And XML is proving to have a significant impact on other industries as well. When we return,
we'll find out how New Mexico, the news industry, and NASA are all using XML.
New Mexico boasts one of the most technologically savvy courts in the country. From video monitors
in the courtroom to electronic filing of court documents, New Mexico has been leading the
charge to combine cutting-edge technology with even-handed justice. Still, like every
other court in the nation, the Federal Court of New Mexico is virtually a prisoner to paperwork.
Half the time spent on a paper document is stapling it, destapling it, punching holes
in it, restapling it, filing it, taking it out, copying it, restapling it, manhandling
that document. And with electronic filing, anyone who has any need to see that document
has instant access to it. As an Assistant U.S. Attorney with the District
of New Mexico, John Zavitz may be dealing with 40 or 50 cases at any one time. Juggling
that many cases, he's made good use of the electronic filing system.
It may encourage longer working hours because you can file 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
but it is, you know, a very good tool to have. Especially since I travel once or twice a
month out of state, I can access and file things from wherever I am.
Hello. Can I file this, please?
Despite the technological savvy of attorneys like John Zavitz, four years into the electronic
filing program, only 20 percent of documents submitted to the court were being filed electronic.
Thank you very much. Part of the problem was that recruiting attorneys,
training them, and providing technical support was both time-consuming and cost-prohibitive.
We'd known all along that we were going to have to have vendor support, that we were
going to need some help. You can handle 50, but you can't handle 5,000 attorneys very
easily. So Rich Himes and Mitch Alphers decided to
incorporate XML into the electronic filing system. By using a standard data format, they
hope to encourage outside vendors to create their own versions of the electronic court
filing interface. Attorneys could then buy these value-added services, and the vendor
would be obligated to provide technical support. As long as the information came back to the
court encoded in XML, everyone was happy. What XML is going to do is it's going to
turbocharge electronic filing. Because there are a lot of tools available, because it's
an open standard, it'll make it more widely available, the market will open up, that will
result in more court filings, just by a tremendous amount.
From justice to journalism, XML is just about everywhere. Wave-O Corporation is a publicly
traded company that moves news stories, photos, and video over the Internet.
Our principal application is to help people who build websites add ever-changing so-called
fresh or sticky content to their websites. Sticky means you want to come back often.
You see the story, you say, that's interesting, I want to come back to the site. Wave-O's
mission is to make the information available in a standardized form, and we've chosen XML
as the vehicle to do that, then find a way to transmit that information simply, easily,
effectively, so they can deploy it, put it on their site, and give their end users access
to it. XML is a critical part of this whole process,
because it allows Wave-O's computers to automatically tag stories as they come through, and immediately
send them along to the appropriate websites. We need to write computer programs, because
we need to do this in the fraction of an eye blink. We need to have news come in, get consistently
classified, and get shipped out. XML was the answer to our dreams. We needed an open, extensible,
documented, well-understood protocol for presenting information that was supported by software,
so that we could take every publisher's information and faithfully represent it in a single format.
XML lets me do that precisely. Wave-O's XML-based product is called MediaExpress,
and it's in use today on over 300 websites, ranging from internal corporate sites to large
general-interest portals. We're currently running between three and four million dollars of
annual revenue on just selling XML news, on top of our regular news revenue base. Many
people today say that XML is a promise. It hasn't made anybody any money. I'm living
proof. That's absolutely false. If you think making money is a great motivator
for using XML, imagine what the promise of a new world could inspire. When we return,
we'll follow XML to the final frontier.
XML is indeed out of this world, or will soon be. NASA is building SOFIA, the Stratospheric
Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a reconditioned 747 built to hold a two-and-a-half meter
telescope. SOFIA will look into other galaxies from the stratosphere.
What we want to do is to look at star formation regions, for instance. Discovery of all of
these new solar systems, of course, begs the question about life in the universe. Particularly
if you think that life has to be planetary-based, SOFIA will help in that quest.
Bob Lowenstein is working with computer engineers at NASA to build an infrared camera for SOFIA,
a camera that will be controlled using XML. NASA began developing an XML-based language
two years ago in hopes of more quickly modifying the huge number of astronomical instruments
it maintains, literally, throughout the galaxy. Thus was born Astronomical Instrument Markup
Language, or AIML. AIML was developed in part by Troy Ames, a computer engineer at NASA.
They are always upgrading instruments. They're adding new components, picking a test environment.
So the environment is very dynamic. And if you're always making these changes, there's
always a time that you have to go back and change the software. And with AIML, that time
is very short. Traditionally, when an instrument's hardware
changed, the software controlling it had to be rewritten. With AIML, however, the only
thing that needs to change is the XML description of the instrument. Thus, turnaround time can
be reduced from months to a matter of days. Advances are both in time savings, which translates
into money, savings, and into capabilities. We can provide a much higher level of capabilities
in this environment than you could before. Every time you answer a question in astronomy,
you get more questions. And the more you know, the more you know you don't know. And the
more curious you are to keep finding out the answers. And that's what this is all about.
Of course, there are many other applications for XML that will more directly impact the
average consumer. For example, XML should make web searches faster.
The way that search engines work is monumentally stupid. Suppose we think of a library. The
way that search engines work is they essentially go to each book, they read all the words on
every page of the book, and they try and guess what the book was about, and then they read
your query and try and guess what your query was about, and they try and match those up.
Well, do real libraries work that way? Of course not. A real library has a catalog.
Well, the web doesn't have any. Clearly, for the web to become a better, faster, more efficient
search vehicle, we need catalogs. And XML is a blindingly obvious data format to use
for those catalogs. In fact, at Artica, Tim Bray's software company
has recently rolled out a website called map.net, where you can find exactly the kind of directory
he's talking about. Using XML, map.net has categorized the World Wide Web into 300,000
separate subjects and presented them in the form of a geographical map and a three-dimensional
cityscape. The application that I'm working on, the mapping
the web application, would be really, really prohibitively expensive and difficult without
XML. map.net illustrates one of XML's most cutting
edge features, its ability to display multiple languages.
Modern software systems typically have to be designed in such a way that they operate
in multiple languages. And since these computer systems have to exchange messages all over
the place, it's clearly the case that the messages have to be encoded in multiple languages,
and XML makes that easy and straightforward. XML itself may be a straightforward technology,
but anyone who's studied it knows that it can quickly become complex with the addition
of style sheets and other peripheral technologies. With XML, there's plenty of complexity behind
the scenes. There are things like DTDs that describe what tags are going to be used in
the vocabulary. There are style sheets that help computers to work out how to take a piece
of data and turn it into HTML. But most users, when they get started with XML, will only
use a very limited set of those things. One thing I'd like to stress is that you
don't have to read all the standards to understand XML. It's a very short specification. There's
lots of software that supports it. All the other specs are just things that people have
thought of doing with XML. And companies are thinking of new applications
all the time. A visit to any software vendor's website will illustrate that.
It's simply hard to envision an interesting computer application built for today's enterprise
that doesn't need XML. And in fact, I think pretty well every software vendor has recognized
that. So despite the fact that XML itself is a
simple concept, you're likely to hear a lot more about it over the next few years.
XML is about keeping the meaning in the data. And that means that XML will be used anywhere
there's data. And that means everywhere. Whether you're an IT specialist or simply a
window shopper on the web, XML is in your future. Because the future of the web is XML.
What are we waiting for?