Much sooner than later, every company will have to do business the XML way, or it won’t do business at all.
Robert H. Hertz, E. Mary Keegan, and David M. H. Phillips, The Value Reporting Revolution
XML (an acronym for “eXtensible Markup Language”) is not a programming language, and, despite its name, it is not just a language for “marking up” documents. XML is a way of expressing the meaning of information – XML provides us with an unambiguous way of expressing the semantics of data that we can communicate to another person or machine.
It is the ability of XML to communicate meaning to a computer, however, that makes it a revolution whose time is inevitable. Human readers have the ability to derive meaning for data from the position or format of a report. Columns represent categories, rows allow the data to be linked to a person or object, and positions within sentences provide us with textual context for the data. However, machines have a great difficulty in determining visual patterns and require a “markup” language to give data categories, textual context, and the other dimensions of meaning.
XML simply provides us with the ability to attach meaningful tags to pieces of information, allowing a machine that reads that information to detect the critical information. A machine that is programmed to read income summaries from financial statements, get simply scan the document for the “income” tag and read the numbers inside the tag, allowing the machine to find thousands of corporate incomes within minutes.
The intent of this blog is to introduce the reader to the powers of XML in the world of financial information and business intelligence. This is the first post for this blog. In the following blogs we will continue to show how the hierarchical structure of XML allows a document to report orders of magnitude more information than was possible before its inception. See Banking the Past, page 180.
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2 comments:
I'm trying to understand what happens next.. XML with built in intelligence that can trigger data communication between other XML data sets.. Think (object database with Virus like abilities)
Suppose a 3rd World Country put and XML data set onto a hard-drive in a random network... Could this Data be told to populate (parent databases) if updates were done... if the XML data set in the 3rd world country was changed. Just because its (owner) of the original data set wanted to have changes known.
Could XML objects trigger actions to happen...
I know this is beyond the scope of this Blog -- but what happens next .. and what is beyond XML and Web 2.0
All that XML can produce is descriptive in nature. It is passive and cannot trigger anything. However, a program written with operating instructions can take advantage of XML knowledge to access info and even change it. The more knowledge you have, the greater the need to secure that knowledge. However, you are still better off with the knowledge.
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