By Mo Krochmal,
A few brackets, some slashes, and a real-time news feed can turn information into knowledge and provide competitive advantage for businesses, an information delivery vendor said on Tuesday.
"Organizations need knowledge, it's basic for good decision-making," said Barry Schaeffer, president of X.Systems, a Reston, Va., information technology consultancy.
Businesses are turning to the Internet for real-time news and using XML as a way to direct focused information to different users and create opportunities for new revenue.
XML is a system of codes used in documents to organize information. It uses brackets and slashes in a similar way to its cousin, HTML, but instead of simply directing how a computer displays the information, it explains how that information will be used.
Wavo, the Phoenix-based company formerly known as Wavephore, held a seminar on Tuesday to explain how it is making a business out of applying XML to a growing demand for real-time news delivery for the Internet.
"There are 6,000 websites with news on them," said James Alexander, Wavo's vice president of marketing. "Companies are putting up internal and external sites and sharing them with their customers and vendors."
Wavo has relationships with agencies such as The Associated Press, Reuters, and CMP Media, taking their content and delivering it to other media companies or to businesses. Wavo has developed XMLNews, a subset of the news industry text format, to tag news content it delivers via satellite or through the Internet.
Right now, it's text and pictures, but other types of information may soon be XML-tagged and sent, an XML guru said.
"Any information that can be chunked can be delivered," said David Megginson, a principal at Meggison Technologies and chairman of the XML Information Set Working Group at the World Wide WebConsortium, an industry group that is guiding the development of the markup language.
The business world is driving the adoption of XML as an important way to conduct business with businesses, he said.
"Most end users are not interested in this unless it does something for them," Megginson said. "Businesses like it because information can be structured and the process can be automated."
While there is no doubt that industry interest in XML is growing, its power will come from ubiquity, he said.
"It's the network effect," Megginson said. "XML makes sense if everyone is using it. XML is a whole bunch of potential."
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