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GCN Home > August 21, 2000 issue

Army group adds XML to its repertoire

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff

The Army Publishing Agency is turning to the Extensible Markup Language to make Army regulations easier to view and search.

The current edition of the Army Electronic Library, a quarterly CD-ROM set, contains four prototype documents converted from their original Standard Generalized Markup Language versions.

An edition due out next month will have about 100 documents tagged in XML, said Stephen P. Wehrly, chief of electronic publishing for the Alexandria, Va., agency.

Making the documents available in XML as well as two proprietary formats, IBM BookManager and Adobe Portable Document Format, gives more viewing and searching options, Wehrly said.

The agency, which runs Army Web sites for distributing administrative publications and forms, has been doing electronic publishing since 1984 and using SGML since 1991, Wehrly said.

“When we started in SGML, it was the era of 20M hard drives,” he said.

Electronic publishing efforts got a big boost in late 1998 when the secretary of the Army issued a “less-paper policy” for reducing or eliminating manuals and forms, Wehrly said.

The agency has led an effort to standardize SGML tagging across all Army publishing. Because XML is a subset of SGML, most existing files were XML-compliant, Wehrly said. It takes only a bit of tweaking the SGML source files to convert them to XML.

The four XML prototype documents in the July 2000 edition of the Army Electronic Library include the 400-page Army Regulation 25-30, which governs the Army Publishing and Printing Program.

Flow with the form

The CD-ROM set also holds 1,204 publications in IBM format, 852 publications in PDF, and 1,933 forms in both PDF and several versions of FormFlow from JetFlow Corp. of Ottawa.

For personnel who need paper copies out in the field, PDF is an efficient way to print only the necessary pages, Wehrly said, but it requires more software than a simple browser.

Documents saved in IBM BookMaster format are translated into Web pages on the fly by IBM’s BookManager BookServer application.

The IBM software has some attractive features, but IBM is not supporting the application as well as Army officials would like, Wehrly said. The agency also wants more powerful searching and indexing.



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