Standards - XML: The Justice Information Sharing Bridge?

Extensible Markup Language, or "XML" as it is commonly referenced, was developed out of the standard generalized markup language (a page definition and formatting language). XML is sanctioned by the World Wide Web Consortium to define a way of transmitting and representing data. XML is designed to transmit data and the meaning of the data by allowing data "tags" that define both the name of a data element and the format of the data within that element. XML also allows structured relationships to be defined; e.g., one named person (subject) in the database might have multiple street addresses and multiple criminal associates, all of which XML is capable of recognizing, revealing, and communicating as "relationships."

XML is easily transmitted as text over the current Internet infrastructure. It is compatible with major Internet transmission protocols, and is also highly compressible for faster transmission. Almost all major software vendors fully support the general XML standard. Major database vendors and their database applications provide software development "tools" to assist justice agency technical staff to develop and use XML more efficiently and productively within agency applications. XML is very developer-friendly, yet ordinary users with no particular XML expertise can look at an XML file and make sense of it. The XML standard is designed to be independent of vendor, operating system, source application, destination application, storage medium, and/or transport protocol.