[March 06, 2002] As of 2002-03, the "xNAL" Name and Address Standard was under development in the OASIS Customer Information Quality Technical Committee. xNAL includes xNL as a Name Standard and xAL as an Address Standard. The 'Name and Address Markup Language (NAML)' was used as the basis for development of xNAL. The group's objective "is to develop a global standard for managing name and address data regardless of country of origin, to simplify things from maintainability point of view... They have broken up xNAL into two XML Languages: [1] xNL: eXtensible Name Language to define the name components, and [2] xAL: eXtensible Address Language to define the address components. This break up provides the flexibility to users of these standards to use one or both these standards depending upon their application environment..."
Development of xNAL is meant to address problems associated with name and address data, for example: "(1) Challenges in the treatment of name and address occur mostly during data entry. (2) Errors and discrepancies in customer information mostly occur during the consolidation of files from different lines of business. (3) The order in which address elements are naturally presented varies from country to country. (4) In some countries the house number is provided before the street name, in other countries the house number is given after the street name. For some countries the house number is essential to determine the postcode, for other countries a simple city input is sufficient. (5) Correct entry of an address in an international environment becomes heavily dependent on the knowledge of the person performing the data entry, or the ability to interpret the appropriate address elements..."
From the CIQ FAQ document: "The CIQ TC has spent close to two years in building xNAL that is application independent and truly global, and hence, can be readily applied to any name and address specific applications including Postal services and address validation. This is where xNAL standard differs from other address standards initiatives around the world that concentrate on a specific area namely, Postal Services. Note that name and addresses are important customer data elements in many applications also and not just Postal services alone. Not every application that uses customer name and address data is for postal business. Name and address, for example, plays a major role in identifying customer relationships. If a Postal Organisation of a country wants to use CIQ standards for defining their postal services, they can build a standard/application around the xNAL standard that is very domain specific for their postal services. Given that xNAL is designed to handle the address structures of all countries at an abstract or detailed level, it make it easier for applications to concentrate on building domain specific standards/applications around xNAL..." [2002-03-06] See similarly "Objectives of the CIQ TC."
References:
- OASIS CIQ standards overview
- Example xNAL schemas
- Example xNAL DTDs
- Example xNAL instance documents
- OASIS Customer Information Quality Technical Committee
- CIQ TC members
- Frequently Asked Questions About CIQ Standards
- CIQ mailing list archive
- [May 08, 2002] "XML Standards for Global Customer Information Management." By Ram Kumar. In DM Review (May 2002). "XML plays a significant role in the efforts many companies are undertaking to integrate e-business and customer information management applications with their enterprise systems. Companies can define XML grammars that deal with customer information management. These can be used to interface data between systems in a more open and simplified way, saving time and reducing error, and to represent customer data in a common language across the different lines of business. However, vendor-proprietary XML grammars can cause problems when data is exchanged between systems. Special XML converters are needed to move data, which defeats the purpose of using XML in the first place. The best solution would be to develop a -- that is, regardless of the geography or culture in which the data resides. The term "global" is very important, particularly when it comes to e-business and e-CRM business models, where organizations deal with customers on a worldwide basis. Global Web customers require 24x7 service. They have language differences, multiple data and shipping formats, and vast differences in demographics, tastes, preferences and so on... Due to the lack of XML standards for managing customer information and exchange/interchange that is open, application-independent and vendor-neutral, approximately two years ago, the Customer Information Quality (CIQ) Technical Committee of OASIS accepted the challenge of building such standards. The committee has now developed three powerful XML languages for customer information management and exchange -- xNAL, xCIL and xCRL... xCRL is the XML standard for managing customer relationship data and is designed to be application-independent, vendor-neutral, open and, most importantly, truly global. xCRL uses xNAL for representing customer name and address data and xCIL for representing other customer information. xCRL is also defined as a separate standard to enable simplicity and flexibility in the usage of the CIQ standards and provides the flexibility to represent customer data at an abstract or a detailed level..." References: (1) OASIS CIQ TC website; (2) "Customer Identity / Name and Address Markup Language (CIML, NAML)"; (3) "Markup Languages for Names and Addresses."
- See also: "Markup Languages for Names and Addresses."
- Earlier documentation:
