Handling 1200 Goverment Forms in XML Schema

All public authorities that regulate the enterprises in Denmark have teamed up to form a public-private partnership with the purpose of creating a new enterprise portal. The primary goal is to focus on the needs of enterprises by creating one single entry point to all information and services needed to perform administrative tasks. By doing so, the portal will provide Danish businesses with an opportunity to solve almost all administrative tasks online. Among other things, it will in time be possible to report all information demanded by public authorities directly through the Internet.

Since the portal uses shared standards for exchange of data (XML), the portal also provides strong leverage for expanded reuse of data. Thus, when the portal is fully developed, enterprises will only have to report data to one public authority. The authority then makes the data available to other agencies in a standardised manner.

The Portal gives access to 1200 Government forms. On the basis of these paper forms, electronic versions have been created, modelled in W3C XML Schema. The schemas has been produced partly by automation and partly by hand, and has resulted in more than 17,000 individual schema modules. During 2004 quality assurance of these schema modules have begun to ensure NDR compliance and optimal reuse both syntactic and semantic. This is done by three means:

1. Domain commitees/Agencies evaluating the schema modules and taking responsibility

2. automated NDR compliance checker

3. manual quality assurance on samples

This process has resulted in renewed insight into how this process can be improved and how the problem could otherwise could have been addressed.