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Last modified: May 08, 2002
xNAL Name and Address Standard (xNL, xAL)

[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."

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