Marion Royal of GSA is agreeable to co-chairing a follow-on group if the EIEITC decides to charter one. He has reviewed LMI's recommendations, one of which is to review the laws and regulations affecting the use of XML. He noted that GSA can amend the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) fairly easily, if appropriate to facilitate the effective use of XML. He suggested that perhaps the FIPS governing EDI should be amended. Finally, he indicated that NIST is willing to co-chair the follow-on workgroup.

GSA and NIST are already working on a roadmap for standards focusing on electronic commerce, of which XML is one. The roadmap will be rendered on a Website or, at a minimum, in a document: 1) identifying the groups working on pertinent standards, and 2) assessing how best to coordinate with them. For example, it may be appropriate to have a Government agent to register elements and schemas with OASIS. Other possibilities include a model information architecture for agency implementation of XML and/or sponsorship of some pilot projects. Marion would like to enlist the support of the IT architects for such an endeavor. Owen Ambur of the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed that such an initiative should be a productive focus for those folks, but Martin Smith of the U.S. International Trade Commission questioned whether they have sufficient resources.

John Shea of the Department of Energy suggested that XML be used to facilitate disabled access, e.g., by providing a schema for Government Web pages and/or an Alt tag pointing to ASCII text.

Ron Collison indicated that NPR will be working with agencies to identify the top 500 Government forms and to make them available by electronic means by the end of the year, as provided in the President's E-Gov directives.

Martin expressed the desire to have the follow-on workgroup co-chaired by someone from one of the agencies that is not responsible for providing centralized guidance, i.e., that the co-chair from GSA be paired with someone from an agency other than NIST. He inquired as to Owen's willingness to serve as co-chair. Owen indicated that he would be more than willing to do so, if that is what the EIEITC desires, but that the importance of the institutional support that an agency like NIST could provide should be taken into account. He also indicated a preference for the establishment of task-oriented teams, rather than a general oversight/coordination team, but that he would be supportive of the formal establishment of such a team.

Owen distributed his revised (May 4) draft of the recommendations outlined by Martin for presentation to the EIEITC on May 18. The revised draft is also available at: http://irm.fws.gov/XMLrec.html (local copy)