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October 17th - 19th,
1999
"XML Offers Insurers Quicker, Better Use of
Data" In the 21st century, insurers may have most of their information manipulation through automation in real time, and in cases where people have to be involved, they will have at their fingertips all the information they need to make a decision--in large part because of a developing computer language called XML. Formally known as extensible markup language, XML separates the presentation from the data, so you can access the data without the presentation, said Jym Barnes, executive vice president, Electronic Commerce & Internet Solutions, NaviSys, St. Louis. Barnes spoke Oct. 19 at "Continuing the E-volution," A.M. Best Co.'s 12th annual insurance information and technology conference. Whereas HTML, the Web language frequently used today, allows tags that describe how the data should look, XML allows tags that have information about the data. "It's data about data," Barnes said. For example, "chip" in HTML could mean a person's name, a
computer chip or a chocolate chip. In XML "chip" would appear as
" XML makes it easy for one computer to communicate with another, Barnes said. Neither the sender nor the receiver has to know how the other's system is organized. Also, different style sheets may be applied to an XML document so that the information can be presented in different ways. Insurers using XML can easily share information with stakeholders, including agents, underwriters and reinsurers. They can also share data between front-office applications, such as contact management and needs analysis, and between front and back offices, as in a case of administration systems providing information to contact management systems. Currently, XMLife is being developed as a standard language
for the life insurance industry, Barnes said. "Eventually, you should have the
ability to do point-of-sale underwriting," he said. |
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XML: Turning Interactivity into
e-Commerce: