My personal involvement with XML processing goes back just about 10 years now, it’s been a great personal adventure, from utter co nfusion, to enlightenment and then overuse abuse before coming back to enabling the services revolution. For my first post here I thought best to start with some background and a bit of future gazing to help explain who I am (largely a data-orientated XML geek) and what interests me.

There is no doubt I am biased here, but when I hear people characterize XML as just “angle brackets” (or compare JSON with XML for that matter), I know they missed the point. The implementation of this ideal in XML is far from perfect, but it meets the good enough rule for the vision and that is I think about all we can ask for something so ambitious. For me it’s never been about the syntax but about the the joining of two parts of the data processing world so that we could at last seamlessly mix our human languages and those of our machines in an inclusive model that did not discriminate.

My prediction for the third phase has to be the opening of that data to unexpected and ad-hoc use. 0 mash-ups and social networking they are just the surface artifacts of something much bigger. I think we can all feel that, but as yet don’t know fully what lurks below the water of this particular iceberg.

While I so mean this in the sense of Web 2.

So where to next? I mention services above because they represent phase 2 or what I think of as at least a 3 phase transition in how we think about data. If the merging of semi-structured and structured data with XML was the first phase, then the integration of application data silos via service & resource architectures with XML has to be the second phase and that fe els like it is now also nearing completion at least in visi on if not in implementation.

If I was a betting man maybe I would put some money on the data portability project having the strongest vision here altho ugh it is rather too biased to the social and idealistic at times for my tastes.

The software stack they promote is certainly something to note, OpenID, OAuth, RSS, OPML, microformats,, RDF, apml, & XMPP quite a collection if ever I saw one.

software.intel.com