The Danish OIO-XML Project (OIO-XML)

The Danish OIO-XML project focuses on the coordination and support of the development and standardization of OIO-XML interfaces and vocabularies. A national OIO Data standardization Committee is responsible for ensuring coherence and momentum in the standardization of XML-based interfaces and vocabularies. This committee foresees the development of the XML standards in the Danish public sector.

Main results, benefits and impacts

Main indicators of impact and results are the outreach of service provision and the effects achieved for agencies and other users: Outreach: The data standardization effort has over the last three years provided Denmark with a strong set of OIO-XML schemas all based on a nationally agreed set of Naming and Design Rules (NDR). As mentioned, all OIO-XML schemas are stored in the InfoStructureBase (http://isb.oio.dk), which is public available (on the Internet) and the free-to-use XML Schema repository, custom-built for the XML project and in production for three years now. The impact of this effort has clearly been an ever-growing operational base for creating both new XML schemas and web services. Effects: Besides the obvious result of establishing data standards based on OIO-XML schemas for several public IT solutions in all Denmark, several other interesting results regarding the data standardization process have been detected. The two major results are: - XML schemas are not enough to completely determine a data standard. To create a complete data standard covering both the syntacic and semantic levels, it is necessary to include the conceptual/logical data model together with the schemas. - It is very important to standardize both data and the business processes in which the data operates. When standardizing data together its processes gives the data context and makes it much clearer precisely what to prioritize and standardize. At the moment business processes are not formally standardized as data is. Because of this it is much too early to measure performance benefits for services or even reduced costs except for a few cases. It is also to early to establish any level of a service-oriented architecture.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

The learning points are indicated by the innovative issues of the case: - a standard for electronic data exchange in the whole public administration independent of the service domain based on XML has been determined. This standard can be seen as a response to the decentralised structure and responsibilities in the Danish public sector which therefore enables nation wide outreach; - the standard is expandable by further schemas for different authorities or services independent of their sector. After the standard has been defined as XML Schema, an easy creation of the corresponding web service definitions by a WSDL tool is enabled. The Danish OIO-XML project considers the people who have to deal with the standards, and most often are non-technicians, by describing the technical specifications also from a conceptual and user centric point of view. Transferability limits of the case: OIO-XML may be transferred to countries or services where no central data processing is possible or envisaged. Transferability is a goal in itself of OIO-XML, enabling transferability to other services and other sectors respectively the coverage of all workflows. Further XML-Schemas will be developed step-by-step. Single elements are re-used so that XML-Schemas don't have to be created from scratch. Scope: National