Open formats and interfaces for exchange of public information

Abstract

Electronic reporting is an important part of all national eGovernment initiatives. XML4DR is a standard based on XML, proposed by a consortium funded by the European Commission. An application used for reporting from municipalities to central government has been developed by Comfact AB. A platform independent application will allow each municipality to freely chose tools such as browser, text processor and operating system. A platform independent application will rely on either open standards or a set of vendor specific pieces of code for the deviation form the standard. In this thesis I have evaluated the possibility of using W3C DOM to implement a reporting system using the results from the IQML project. Since DOM is still in a rapid development, Internet browsers have just started to develop the support for W3C DOM. Also the application developed by Comfact have some vendor specific code, because the needed methods were not available in any browser at the time of development. To determine the feasibility of using DOM for the reporting system I have compared the required functionality of the reporting application to the functionality defined in DOM and the standard compliance of some Browsers. To confirm the results I also developed a “hello world” application, that only followed standard. I have found out that the standards that are defined by standardization organizations cover the required functionality for implementing the hello world application. Unfortunately, currently none of the browsers supports all the functionality needed to implement the hello world according to the DOM standard. Currently, Mozilla is the browser with the best standard conformance. Only the XML uploading of a file to the server is missing. May 2003, Michael Eric Menk 2