Global XML Standards for Customer Information/Profile Management

[Ram Kumar <rkumar@msi.com.au>]

Hi

The Customer Information Quality TC has now completed its first phase
of developing two XML Standards for Customer Information/Profile Management
and
is eagely looking for feedback and comments.

The standards developed are:

xNAL: eXtensible Name and Address Language. Name and Address data is the
most complex
customer data as it varies significantly between countries. This standard
was developed by the
committee that had members who had over 15 years of expertise in managing
name and address
data. This standard can handle name and address data from more than 100
countries and is being
tuned now to make it truly global. The beauty of this standard that the data
can be fragmented into
detailed level or can be represented in a higher abstract level. Example:

23 Archer Street,
Chatswood,
NSW 2067,
Australia

The following are valid acording to the standard:

<AddressLines>
 <AddressLine>23 Archer Street</AddressLine>
 <AddressLine>Chatswood</AddressLine>
 <AddressLine>NSW 2067</AddressLine>
 <AddressLine>Australia</AddressLine>
</AddressLine>

OR

<AddressDetails>
 <Country>
  <CountryName>Australia</CountryName>
  <AdministraiveArea Type="State">
   <AdministrativeAreaName>NSW</AdministrativeAreaName>
   <Locality Type="Suburb">
    <LocalityName>Chatswood</LocalityName>
    <Street>
      <StreetName>Archer</StreetName>
      <StreetType>Street</StreetType>
      <StreetNumber>23</StreetNumber>
    </Street>
    <PostalCode>
     <PostalCodeNumber>2067</PostalCodeNumber>
    </PostalCode>
   </Locality>
  </AdministrativeArea>
 </Country>
</AddressDetails>

You can also mix detailed level and abstract level within the same data.
For example <StreetName> can be just the name of the street as above
or it can be "Archer Street". Or, AddressLine can be mixed with detailed
description.

For maintenance & flexibility purposes, xNAL has been broken up into two
languages
that it uses as references. The languages are:

xNL : eXtensible Name Language, that deals with customer name data ( a
customer
can be a person or company) and provides more than 30 XML tags to represent
name
data. It can also handle relationships (eg. C/O, W/O, etc...)

xAL: eXtensible Address Language, that deals with customer address data and
provides more than 100 XML tags to represent the data. It can handle
multiple
addresses for a customer that helps to keep track of customer address
changes.
It has been tested for over 80 countries' address data.

The other standard that the committee has developed is called:
xCIL: eXtensible Customer Information Language that deals with data that is
customer-centric
(eg. tel, DOB, Occupation, sex, age, account, ID cards, etc) and that helps
to uniquely identify
a customer. It also uses xNL and xAL as references. It provides more than
120 XML tags to
represent customer data at a detailed level or at an abstract level.
Uniquely identifying a customer
is the most difficult process in a CRM business as companies are struggling
to get a
"Single View of a Customer" across their disparate and inconsistent
databases.

Note that this committee is not in the business of concentrating on
Transport layer, security layer,
privacy etc. of customer data. All it is concentrating is on developing a
common and global standard
for representing customer data that improves data quality and data
integrity.

The committee is also working on a new standard called xCRL (eXtensible
Customer Relationship
Language) that will enable dealing with :
 - Person to Person relationships (contact details, dependency, trustees,
beneficiaries, etc...)
 - Person to company relationships, and (trading as, dependency, contact
details, etc..)
 - company to company relationships (parent-subsidiary, trading as, doing
business, etc...)

If you feel that this work can be used in your TC, please feel free to
contact me and I will be glad
to discuss this further.

Details of this standards work can be found in
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ciq/

Regards

Ram Kumar
Chairman, CIQ TC