New Web Language Speeds Data Exchange.

In the 21st century, insurers may have most of their information through automation in real time, and in cases where people are 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.

Whereas HTML, the Web language most often used now, 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.

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.

For example, the word "chip" in HTML could mean a person's name, a computer chip or a chocolate chip. In XML "chip" would appear as "[less than]first-name[greater than]chip[less than]first-name[greater than]," so the receiving computer would know immediately what kind of information it was.

Insurers using XML can easily share information with stakeholders, including agents, underwriters and reinsurers. They also can 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.