Tutorial M2. Monday, May 21, 2001, 9:00 a.m. 12:45 p.m.
Extended Markup Language (XML) and Emerging Legal XML Standards by Laurence L. Leff
XML is a standard for exchanging structured information between heterogeneous software and different organizations.
The Gartner Group has estimated that within one year, 70% of the business-to-business electronic commerce will be
conducted via XML. Standards determine the formal and content of messages to be exchanged by a particular set of
participants. These are specified as Data Type Definitions (DTD's); as each organization's software receives a message, it
is decoded using the corresponding DTD. Upon completing the first part of the tutorial, participants will be able to read
XML and write DTD's to specify XML to be used in their area of interest.Then, we will see how this has been applied.
First, participants will become familiar with commercial XML, as exemplified by purchase orders, price check requests
and other material exchanged in business-to-business procurement in the Common Business Language, promulgated by
Commerce One, Inc. Then, we will discuss emerging standards from the Legal XML organization, such as the Court
Filing XML proposed standard, which is the most advanced toward comercial implementation. Finally, we will review the
ongoing work of the Legal XML organization.
Laurence L. Leff, Ph.D., is an associate professor of computer science at Western Illinois University. During his tenure
there, he has received substantial industrial funding for projects in varying areas of the computer science discipline.
Currently, he develops XML standards and DTD's in association with the Legal XML standards group and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Electronic Commerce Architecture project and has written Java software to
manipulate Legal XML documents.