XML Community of Practice

Meeting Notes

December 13, 2006

This meeting was hosted by Karl Hebenstreit at GSA headquarters. Owen Ambur announced that the xmlCoP’s charter has been extended for two more years, and he introduced the new co-chairs, Ed Coia of the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service and Kirk Keller of the Missouri Department of Conservation. With respect to priorities for future consideration by the community, Ed indicated that he’d like to focus on XML standards and registry services. In addition to those topics, Kirk said he’d like to bring greater attention to the State and municipal perspective.

With respect to future meetings, the consensus was to continue the routine of meeting on the third Wednesday of each month, at least for the next few months, and Ed indicated he would look into prospects for securing regular meeting space. John Triplett has already agreed to host the January 17 meeting at IRS in Lanham, Maryland, adjacent to the New Carrollton metro station. Amin Hassam suggested that efforts be made to schedule meetings of the xmlCoP in coordination with other XML-related groups, such as the Strategy Markup Language CoP and the XBRL CoP. Brand Niemann noted that the CIO Council is now maintaining a Web-based calendar for all meetings under the auspices of the CIOC, and he indicated that John Andre of GSA or Stephanie Powers of the CIOC’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee (AIC) are the contact for having events placed on the CIOC calendar.

Regarding the xml.gov site, Owen referred to the site map and noted that those who have previously been responsible for stewardship of various pages during the six years since the xmlCoP was initially chartered have gradually moved on to other responsibilities. So in recent times he has been maintaining all of the content on the site and some of it is out-of-date. Kirk indicated he has had experience with implementing RSS and the thought was raised of implementing it on the xml.gov site, but no conclusions were drawn with respect to specific plans or new stewardship assignments for content on the site. Owen indicated he would continue to do his best to keep it up to date.

Owen noted that the listserv currently has about 250 subscribers but that subscription has not been promoted. The listserv service automatically weeds out addresses that are no longer active, but no real effort has been put into trying to attract new subscribers. Also, although the original vision was to use the listserv for group discussion, in recent years usage has been limited to announcements of general interest so as to avoid inundating subscribers with messages of little direct interest to more than a few.

No decisions were made to make any changes in the way the listserv is being managed and used, but Karl indicated he thought that better means of facilitating meetings and other forms of collaboration will be needed. Owen noted that potential for GSA to provide such support is one of the benefits of Karl’s involvement with the xmlCoP, and since he works in the procurement division of GSA, another way in which he might be able to help draw some good connections is by helping to ensure that the ET.gov process feeds seamlessly into the Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE).

KC Morris reported briefly on the activities of the XML Schema Interoperability Work Group (XSI WG), noting that NIST recently issued a new release of its Quality of Design (QOD) tool.

Richard Campbell indicated the XBRL CoP is still looking into prospects for registering the xbrl.gov domain. Concern has been expressed by representatives of the Netherlands, but the consensus of those in attendance at the xmlCoP meeting seemed to be that such concerns should not preclude registration of the domain in order to foster increased attention to and collaboration around XBRL by government agencies. Regarding the relationship of XBRL taxonomies to the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Data Reference Model (DRM), Richard indicated he will renew his efforts to meet with Suzanne Acar, who co-chairs the CIOC/AIC’s Data Architecture Subcommittee, to explore coordination opportunities.

Brand Niemann provided a brief update on the activities of the Agile Financial Data Services (AFDS) CoP, and Owen briefly referenced the plans of the StratML CoP to specify an XML vocabulary and schema for strategic plans, under the leadership of Adam Schwartz of GPO.

With Karl’s assistance, Owen displayed and pointed out some of the most recent submissions to the ET.gov site, the XML-related submissions indexed on i411's site, and the ET CoPs at Stages 2 and 3 of the process. He suggested that it would be good to spend at least a few minutes at each xmlCoP meeting considering how to foster ET CoPs forming around XML-related components and specifications.

Time did not permit much discussion of the highlights of the XBRL International conference or the XML 2006 conference. However, Owen noted that one highlight of the latter was Adobe’s announcement of its project – code named “Mars” – to develop an XML version of PDF.

Those who participated in this meeting in person included:

Ed Coia, Department of the Treasury, and new Co-Chair, xmlCoP

Owen Ambur, Co-Chair Emeritus, xmlCoP

Michel Biezunsky, InfoLoom

Richard Campbell, FDIC, Co-Chair, XBRL CoP

Bruce Cox, USPTO

Amin Hassam, i411

Karl Hebenstreit, GSA

Joab Jackson, GCN

Marcel Jemio, Treasury

Frank Napoli, LMI

Brand Niemann, EPA, SICoP & AFDS CoP

Bruce Troutman, 8020 Data

Susan Turnbull, GSA, Co-Chair, CIOC/AIC/ET Subcommittee

Allyson Ugarte, XBRL US & Spain

Sylvia Webb, GEFEG

Those who identified themselves as participating via teleconference were:

Kirk Keller, Missouri Department of Conservation, and new Co-Chair, xmlCoP

Don Geiger, Treasury, Co-Chair, XBRL CoP

Cindy Howard, Corel

Josh Lubell, NIST

KC Morris, NIST

Please convey any additions or corrections to Owen_Ambur@ios.doi.gov