Open data and the XML community
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.