Talli asked what I think about this Ballmer sees XML revolution(FCW.com) article.
It talks about how the government will be radically reengineered around data
sharing and XML. Well, I can say that I know of two instances where
exactly this is happening.
In the first instance, my brother-in-law works at the EPA, and they are
gearing up to publish their water purity Oracle/GIS (Geographic Information
System) database via XML. Currently they allow qualified users direct
access to the database (no firewall), which has some major security and
performance issues. Serving up XML files instead should help convert an
active database application into an easier to support file serving
application. I think that they have to make up their DTD, however,
because no standard exists. When they do that, they'll have to decide
between RDF, entities, attributes, XML-Schema, maybe even SOAP and XML-RPC,
etc. In other words, they don't have much to go by to ensure that they
implement something that won't evolve. And when it evolves, all their
users who've written custom import software to take their XML feed and turn
it in to something useful will have to write it all over again.
The second instance is a bit more first-person, so to speak. I went on a
national tour speaking at a seminar about the INS' forthcoming Student and
Electronic Visitor Information System ("SEVIS"). This is the system INS
wants to put in place to track foreign student Visas. This system relies on
having larger campuses submit their immigration/visa information to the INS
via batches of XML. There are many problems with the system as articulated
by the INS (and their contractor EDS), but fundamentally the design of the
system confusingly supports both the document paradigm in XML and the RPC
paradigm. It attempts to produce a document-generation system (i.e. for
visa generation) but what the INS really wants to do is capture event
reporting (i.e. 'this student didn't show up'). So their stuff will evolve,
because they didn't bake extensibility into the main format, and when they
try to jam it into their document-centric DTD is going to become horribly
confusing and unwieldy.
So when you actually look at the government's initiatives to do XML data
sharing, they look pretty crude. SOAP and Visual Studio.NET won't help it
at all. Mature specs and widespread acnkowledgement of best practices will,
but I'm not holding my breath.
11:06:30 PM 
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