Report of Official foreign Travel to Spain April 17-29, 1999.

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The Department of Energy (DOE) has moved rapidly toward electronic production, management, and dissemination of scientific and technical information. The World-Wide Web (WWW) has become a primary means of information dissemination. Electronic commerce (EC) is becoming the preferred means of procurement. DOE, like other government agencies, depends on and encourages the use of international standards in data communications. Like most government agencies, DOE has expressed a preference for openly developed standards in preference to proprietary designs promoted as "standards" by vendors. In particular, there is a preference for standards developed by organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) that use open, public processes to develop their standards. Among the most widely adopted international standards is the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML, ISO 8879:1986, FIPS 152), which DOE has selected as the basis of its electronic management of documents. Besides the official commitment, which has resulted in several specialized projects, DOE makes heavy use of coding derived from SGML, and its use is likely to increase in the future. Most documents on the WWW are coded in HTML ("Hypertext Markup Language"), which is an application of SGML. The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), more » with the backing of major software houses like Microsoft, Adobe, and Netscape, is promoting XML ("eXtensible Markup Language"), a class of SGML applications, for the future of the WWW and the basis for EC. W3C has announced its intention of discontinuing future development of HTML and replacing it with XHTML, an application of XML. In support of DOE's use of these standards, I have served since 1985 as Chairman of the international committee responsible for SGML and related standards, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 (SC34) and its predecessor organizations. During my April 1999 trip, I convened the spring 1999 meeting of SC34 in Granada, Spain. I also attended a major conference on the use of SGML and XML. SC34 maintains and continues to enhance several standards. In addition to SGML, which is the basis of HTML and XML, SC34 also works on the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL), which is the basis for W3C's XSL ("eXtensible Style Language," to be used with XML) and the Hypermedia/Time-based Document Structuring Language (HyTime), which is a major influence on W3C's XLink ("XML Linking Language"). SC34 is also involved in work with ISO's TC184, Industrial Data, on the linking of STEP (the standard for the interchange of product model data) with SGML. In addition to the widespread use of the WWW among DOE's plants and facilities in Oak Ridge and among DOE sites across the nation, there are several SGML-based projects at the Y-12 Plant. My project team in Information Technology Services developed an SGML-based publications system that has been used for several major reports at the Y-12 Plant and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). SGML is a component of the Weapons Records Archiving and Preservation (WRAP) project at the Y-12 Plant and is the format for catalog metadata chosen for weapons records by the Nuclear Weapons Information Group (NWIG). Supporting standards development allows DOE and the Y-12 plant both input into the process and the opportunity to benefit from contact with some of the leading experts in the subject matter. Oak Ridge has been for some years the location to which other DOE sites turn for expertise in SGML and related topics. « less