The DoD develops and manages information exchange requirements and their associated business practices to support all military operations. To support the required information exchanges, messaging standards known as Message Text Formats (MTFs) and associated business rules have been developed and used for the past thirty years. These messaging standards serve a global user community and are subject to international agreements. Despite their usefulness in promoting interoperability among automated information processing systems of many nations, the proprietary nature of MTFs has presented cost, development and maintenance challenges.

An international effort, called the XML-MTF Initiative, was initiated to investigate the use of XML to improve the quality, capability and affordability of the MTF standards. To satisfy military information exchange requirements, the Initiative leverages an extensive investment in MTF metadata. The Initiative likewise leverages industry XML standards to improve information location, retrieval, exchange and processing across system, organizational and international boundaries. It enables the military to take advantage of low cost, high quality, rapidly evolving commercial software.

Consequently, US services and agencies have recently approved specifications for representing MTF messages using XML and XML Schema. This provides a common method for a number of nations to represent their military information exchanges in an industry standard format. An overview of the events leading to this accomplishment and current activities supporting the XML-MTF Initiative is presented with an emphasis on the approach taken and on lessons learned.