We at IVANS were fascinated with the lively debate on the ACORD XML standards and their development between Kevin S. Kelly and Josh Lee of Microsoft in the June issue of Technology Decisions, and Gregory Maciag and Ron Dudley of ACORD in the July issue. As active participants in ACORD, we would like to contribute to this debate.

If anyone thinks, as Microsoft apparently does, that all or most of the value of the ACORD XML standards is in the data dictionary, then that dictionary is certainly there and available for use. It has been officially there for a year now. In P&C, that is where ACORD started, and that was the first thing finished.

However, having a data dictionary without predictability as to the message structure doesnt give assistance to receivers of standard messages. Its easier to deal with varying tag names and a predictable structure than predefined tag names and an unpredictable structure. The former is a straightforward one-to-one translation; the latter requires semantic leaps and assumptions that lead to confusion when different people process the same message differently. For example, if you call a sublocation a building, but you know that the terms have the same meaning, thats easy to handle. But if you neglect to specify where a vehicle is located or who is the primary driver on a vehicle, or if you convey this information in different ways (Sender A uses references and Sender B uses containment, for example), youve defeated effective data communication.