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A Smarter Way for Better Healthcare
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XML and Healthcare
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What is XML?
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Over the years, Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML) has made the web one of the most revolutionary means of
structuring and presenting information. The limitations of
HTML, however, have forced authors to concentrate more on the
presentation of web pages rather than the structuring of
information. HTML is largely superficial. It describes how a
Web browser should arrange text, images and buttons on a page
and is thus primarily concerned with the appearance of the
page. Therefore, although you may be able to pull up a list of
medications on an HTML webpage, your computer would not know
what to make of the information. It would simply be
interpretated as a list of text.
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XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is the
next evolutionary step in markup languages. XML tags describe
what the information actually is rather than merely what it
looks like. For example, in HTML, an order for a shirt would be
labeled as boldface, paragraph, column and row. XML, however,
would label it as price, size, color and quantity. A program
would then be able to recognize the information as such and
thus be able to manipulate the data much more easily.
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In addition, as a meta-markup language, XML
gives an author the power to create their own set of tags as
they are needed. Although not required by the XML standard,
Document Type Defitinition (DTD) allows authors to codify the
vocabulary and syntax that they wish to use. XML can, therefore, be used to describe information
from any domain or industry. Various disciplines, such as
chemistry, astronomy and mathematics, have already begun to
develop their own domain-specific markup languages. Biosequence
ML (BSML) was designed to allow geneticists to exchange and
manipulate the flood of information produced by gene-mapping
projects such as the Human Genome Project. BSML allows
researchers to search through vast databases of genetic code
and display the data as meaningful maps and charts rather than
as obtuse strings of letters.
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Since XML describes the meaning of content
independent of its display, XML enables exchange of information
between different computer systems. Once data is described in
XML, designers can then apply rules organized into stylesheets
to reformat the work automatically for various devices, such as
mobile phones and handhelds. Furthermore, the information can
be readily displayed in all of the world's major languages.
A Chinese browser, for instance, will have no problem reading
an XML page.
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As a non-proprietary format, XML is also not
encumbered by licenses, copyrights, patents or other
intellectual property right restrictions. Everyone can freely
use the XML format. Furthermore, XML is easy to read and write,
by both machines and humans.
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Some of the goals for XML, as stated in the annotated
specification by Tim Bray, are as follows:
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XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet
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XML shall support a wide variety of applications
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It shall be easy to write programs which process XML
documents
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XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear
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XML documents shall be easy to create. [Next]
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