Balisage Paper: Open data and the XML community
Kurt Cagle
Kurt Cagle is a writer, information architect and developer specializing in XML and Web Technologies. He has authored more than fifteen books and hundreds of articles on XML based technologies such as XSLT, SVG, XUL, XForms, computer ethics and more, and writes the blog UnderstandingXML.com. He has most recently been working with the Firefox browser and Mozilla technologies, as well as XML based languages such as XBL, trying to push what he sees as the re-emergence of client-based programming. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and daughters, where he can usually be found staring out the window at the falling rain while drinking coffee at local coffeehouses.
Abstract
The world of XML is changing. Large super schemas
like OOXML, XBRL, NIEMs, HL7, and so on, push the limits of existing XML software,
while also encouraging the creation of ecosystems built around them, in order to exploit
the large quantities of important data now or soon to be available in these formats.
Standardization around these formats is driven less by existing proprietary formats
and less by industry consortia than by government adoption. The super schemas are
often formulated less as definitions of single concrete vocabularies than as meta-definitions
of families of vocabularies. The confluence of emerging Open Data standards, the government-as-database
conjecture, and a shift towards RESTful services will serve to turbocharge the XML
community.