Where does the XML data come from?

In brief, there's no shortage of XML data available on the Internet, and there are lots of ways to convert legacy data to XML relatively easily. The amount of data and number of support tools has increased very noticeably in the past year, and will surely grow exponentially in the years to come.

In fact, most enterprises will probably soon find themselves overwhelmed by XML data that may come from all sorts of non-XML sources and generated by "middleware" components and applications, but have lasting value and will need to be persistently stored. As this scenario unfolds, many organizations will find it necessary to have a scalable, reliable database such as Software AG?s Tamino, which uses XML and Internet standards to store, retrieve, and query all this data.

Note that the companies and products noted here are intended to be representative of what is possible today, and not by any means an exhaustive list of what is available.

Over the next year or two, more and more data that you will come across in the normal course of your business will be in XML format.

• XHTML. This dialect of HTML in well-formed XML syntax is becoming fairly common on the Internet. For example, http://www.infoworld.com/ presents much of its content in XHTML.

• Web sites published in other XML formats. See http://www.xmltree.com/ for an extensive list. Some interesting examples include http://www.e-numerate.com/datalibrary1.html, a library of hundreds of datasets in a particular XML format - including sports statistics, financial and consumer information, and government data, and http://www.xmltoday.com/examples/stockquote/ for live stock quotes in XML format.

• "Content aggregators" such as news feeds, Web logs, etc. published in RSS, and XML format, including Meerkat, iSyndicate, Moreover, HeadlineWatch, and others. See http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/07/17/heterogeneity.html for more information.

• EI and B2B software tends to use XML to exchange data between applications and business partners. See http://www.xmledi.com/, http://www.webmethods.com/, and many others.

The sorts of tools that currently produce proprietary binary formatted data -- such as word processors, spreadsheets, data entry forms, etc. -- have already begun to be supplemented by equivalent products that produce XML. The biggest vendors, especially Microsoft, have shown a clear commitment to accelerate this trend by saving data in XML format. In the meantime, you can employ products such as:

• XMetaL or other word-processor-like applications that can be used by ordinary office workers without XML expertise to produce documents in XML format.

• Tools are available that produce XML data from online forms that ordinary users can easily fill out. See the offerings from icomXpress and JetForm.

• eNumerate is developing spreadsheet-like application that will produce XML data in a format that can be displayed in browsers via XSL and graphed, plotted, etc. by a free browser plug-in.

As all the companies that have jumped on the XML bandwagon actually implement XML support in their products, it will be increasingly common to be able to simply export data from existing tools in XML format.

• MS Office 2000 exports specialized markup data in XML "islands" inside an HTML data format that is almost well-formed XML.

• ERP and other enterprise-level systems are increasingly supporting XML as an output format. See http://www.mysap.com/ for one prominent example.

• Software design tools such as Rational Rose are supporting the UMI XML format for exchange of UML diagrams, rules, etc.

Finally, a number of specialized tools are being designed to easily convert data in conventional databases and flat files into XML syntax.

• TextPipe is a Windows GUI stream editor that works in a similar manner to Unix sed, perl, grep, etc., converting the data to XML format and optionally generating a DTD to describe the result.
  
• Dave Raggett's famous tidy program easily converts messy, non-standard HTML such as that found on the Web to well-formed XHTML.
  
• upCast, from infinity loop, has both client-side and server-side tools which convert the RTF format supported by Microsoft and other word processor vendors into XML, using heuristics to recreate the logical structure from the layout.