Task Force Pushes Universal Computer Language

By Karen Robb

FEDERAL TIMES STAFF WRITER

An interagency task force is working on a project it thinks will enable different government computer systems to swap data more easily.

The solution, members of the group say, is for agencies to switch to a new software language and for agencies to adopt similar techniques for labeling their computer data with that software language.

Already used extensively by private industry, extensible markup language (XML) can overcome interoperability pro-blems that arise among in-compatible information technology systems.

Driving the effort to improve interoperability among different computer systems is the 1998 Government Paperwork Elimination Act. That law requires agencies to accept transactions from the public electronically, when practical, by 2003.

But agencies may not meet this goal because of their inability to easily transfer electronic data between dif-ferent information systems.

“Agencies could comply with the letter of the law and just rekey the information” to transfer information from one system to another, said Owen Ambur, systems analyst at the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service. “But if we want to do it right, we will embrace XML.”

Ambur is co-chairman of the interagency XML Working Group, which tries to promote wider use of XML in government. That group is part of the interagency Chief Information Officers Council.

XML is a language that can be easily read and understood by computer users and by other computer languages, said Mark Gross, president of Data Conversion Laboratory in Fresh Meadows, N.Y.

Unlike other computer languages, such as those commonly used for word processing and document scanning, XML has a labeling system that allows information to be sorted, searched and stored in a variety of ways.

It can be expensive to convert documents from one computer language to XML, Gross said. But the expense is worthwhile because, once done, that information can be easily transferred from system to system.

Transferring information from one system to another, however, requires that similar types of information be labeled similarly using XML language. For instance, all ZIP codes must be labeled as ZIP codes so they are transferrable from one database to another.

A lack of uniformity among labeling systems can be a stumbling block to implementing XML, said Robert Weideman, vice president of marketing at Cardiff Software Inc. in Vista, Calif.

“If one form labels a data element ‘first name’ and another ‘F. Name,’ you have lost interoperability,” Weideman said.

Weidman said agencies have to be careful when selecting software to implement XML because the language is so new that standards do not yet exist.

“There are some nefarious vendors out there that will try to sell you proprietary systems with unique labeling systems,” Weideman said.

“That defeats the whole purpose of using XML in the first place.”

But Gross believes the importance of uniform labeling standards is overemphasized.

“The medical community uses data differently than someone whose job is to repair tanks,” he said.

“It is natural they will label the similar elements differently.”

While differing information-labeling techniques systems would inhibit the sharing of information between computer systems, that problem could be overcome with relatively simple computer fixes, he said.

“You just tell the computer that ‘F. Name’ equals ‘first name,’ ” Gross said.

Ambur, however, views a proliferation of many different XML labeling systems as a big problem.

“If everyone uses a proprietary system, then citizens will have to use different software for each agency. They aren’t going to do that,” Ambur said.

Ambur believes the way to avoid multiple labeling systems is for government agencies to establish a registry of labeling systems.

“That way agencies don’t have to start from scratch. They can look at the registry and adopt labeling systems already established by [other] agencies,” Ambur said.

The XML Working Group hopes to begin establishing the registry this year and complete the project in 2002.