XML Best Practices in Regard to Development and Interoperability
Scott Hoffman, Tibco/Extensibility, March  19, 2001

This draft is designed to begin a discussion of best practices for XML development within the government.  Many of these practices are common to industry and these should perhaps be used by government and some will be specific to the government requirements.  This document is not designed to completely define these practices but rather start discussion to assist its creation.

• Partner with industry:  There is a tremendous amount to work being done in industry.  They are building many vertical specific vocabularies and there are additional initiatives that tend to be more horizontal in their approach.  Many government agencies have begun working with these initiatives and they are helping to create a standard they can use with their industry partners.  A sample of these are:
   
  • Naval Reserve Force -- Human Resources (HR-XML)
  • GSA -- XML for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (aecXML)
  • DFAS -- eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)
  • NIST, NSF & Department of Education -- Instructional Management System (IMS) Project
  • Air Force -- Open Applications Group (OAG)
  • GSA & NIST -- RosettaNet
     
  There are more in organization in the Chemical, Agriculture, Energy, and Financial industries.  XML.org and other initiatives have tremendous resources of these vocabularies.
   
• Publish the work that is being developed.  This is a tremendous step toward interoperability and also allows other organizations share in the development.  This can lower costs and accelerate usage of the specification.
   
• Maintain extensibility. XML Schema design can be a complicated task but can allow an organization to model a process to gain efficiencies.  Determining how to create the schema and creating an extensible architecture can allow schemas to be versatile and dynamic by design.
   
• Start small. Look for a specific area that you can begin in and then grow as the scope will grow.  Starting with the entire framework of an organization’s data can be overwhelming and prohibitively expensive.  A smaller pilot project can get XML introduced in a production setting and it will grow as the opportunity and resources are available.