Dr. Aly, O.
Computer Science
The purpose of this discussion is to address the advantages and disadvantages of XML used in big data analytics for large healthcare organizations. The discussion also presents the use of XML in the healthcare industry as well as in another industry such as eCommerce.
Advantages of XML
XML has several advantages such as simplicity, platform, and vendor independent, extensibility, reuse by many applications, separation of content and presentation, and improved load balancing (Connolly & Begg, 2015; Fawcett, Ayers, & Quin, 2012). XML also provides support for the integration of data from multiple sources (Connolly & Begg, 2015; Fawcett et al., 2012). XML can describe data from a wide variety of applications (Connolly & Begg, 2015; Fawcett et al., 2012). More advanced search engines capabilities in another advantage of XML (Connolly & Begg, 2015). (Brewton, Yuan, & Akowuah, 2012) have identified two significant benefits of XML. XML can support tags that are created by the users allows the language to be fully extensible and overcome any tag limitation. The second significant benefit of XML in healthcare is the versatility, where any data types can be modeled, and tags can be created for specific contexts.
Disadvantages of XML
The specification of the namespace prefix within DTDs is a significant limitation, as users cannot choose their namespace prefix but must use the prefix defined within the DTD (Fawcett et al., 2012). This limitation exists as W3C completed the XML Recommendation before finalizing how namespaces would work. While DTD has poor support to XML namespaces, it plays an essential part in the XML Recommendation. Furthermore, (Forster, 2008) have identified a few disadvantages of XML. The inefficiency is one of this limitation as XML was initially designed to accommodate the exchange of data between nodes of the different system and not as a database storage platform. XML is described as inefficient compared to other storage algorithms (Forster, 2008). The tags of XML make it readable to humans but requires additional storage and bandwidth (Forster, 2008). Encoded image data represented in XML requires another program to get displayed as it must be un-encoded and then reassembled into an image (Forster, 2008). Three XML parsers that inexperienced developers will not be familiar with: Programs, APIs, and Engines. XML lacks rendering instructions as it is a backend technology in the form of data storage and transmission technology. (Brewton et al., 2012) have identified two significant limitations of XML. The lack of the application that can process XML data and make its data useful. Browsers utilize HTML to render XML document which indicates that XML cannot be used as an independent language from HTML. The second major limitation of XML is the unlimited flexibility of the language, where the tags are created by the user, and there is no standard accepted set of tags to be used in the XML document. The result of this limitation is that the developer cannot create general applications as each company will have its application with its own set of tags.
XML in Healthcare
Concerning XML in healthcare, (Brewton et al., 2012) have indicated that XML was a solution to the problem of finding a reliable and standardized means for storing and exchanging clinical documents. American National Standards Institute has accredited Health Level 7 (HL7) as an organization which is responsible for setting up many communication standards used across America (Brewton et al., 2012). The goal of this organization is to provide standards for the exchange, management and integration of data which support clinical patient care and management, delivery, and the evaluation of the services of healthcare (Brewton et al., 2012). Furthermore, HL7 is developing Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) to provide standards for the representation of the clinical document such as discharge summaries and progress notes. The goal of CDA is to solve the problem of finding a reliable and standardized means for storing and exchanging clinical documents by specifying a markup and semantic structure through XML, allowing medical institutions to share clinical documents. HL7 version 3 includes the rules for messaging as well as CDA which are implemented with XML and are derived from the Reference Information Model (RIM). Besides, XML supports the hierarchical structure of CDA (Brewton et al., 2012). Healthcare data must be secured to protect the privacy of the patients. XML provides signature capabilities which operate identically to regular digital signature (Brewton et al., 2012). In addition to XML signature, it has encryption capabilities which mandate requirements for areas not covered by the secure socket layer technique (Brewton et al., 2012). (Goldberg et al., 2005) have identified some limitations of XML when working with images in the biological domain. The bulk of an image file is represented by the pixels in the image and not the metadata which is regarded as a severe problem. Another related problem is that XML is verbose meaning that XML file is already more massive than the binary file, and the image files are already quite large which causes another problem when using XML in healthcare (Goldberg et al., 2005).
XML in eCommerce
(Sadath, 2013) have discussed some benefits and limitation of
XML in the eCommerce domain. XML has
been advantages of being a flexible hierarchical model suitable to represent
semi-structured data. It is used
effectively in data mining and is described
as the most common tool used for data transformation between different types of
application. In data mining using XML,
there are two approaches to access the XML document: the key-word base search
and query-answering. The key-word based
has no much advantages because search takes place on the textual content of the
document. However, when using the
query-answering approach to access the XML document, the structure should be
known in advance which is not often the case.
The consequences of such lack of knowledge about the structure can lead
to information overload where too much data is
included because the key-word used information does not exist, or if it
incorrectly exists, incorrect answers are received (Sadath, 2013). Thus, various efforts from researchers have
been exerted to find the best approach for data mining in XML, such as XQuery,
or Tree-based Association Rules (TARs) as means to represent intentional
knowledge in native XML.
References
Brewton, J., Yuan, X., & Akowuah, F. (2012). XML in health information systems. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the International Conference on Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (BIOCOMP).
Connolly, T., & Begg, C. (2015). Database Systems: A Practical Approach to Design, Implementation, and Management (6th Edition ed.): Pearson.
Fawcett, J., Ayers, D., & Quin, L. R. (2012). Beginning XML: John Wiley & Sons.
Forster, D. (2008). Advantages and Disadvantages that You Should Know About XML. Retrieved from https://www.informdecisions.com/downloads/XML_Advantages_and_Disadvantages.pdf.
Goldberg, I. G., Allan, C., Burel, J.-M., Creager, D., Falconi, A., Hochheiser, H., . . . Swedlow, J. R. (2005). The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) Data Model and XML file: open tools for informatics and quantitative analysis in biological imaging. Genome biology, 6(5), R47.
Sadath, L. (2013). Data mining in E-commerce: A CRM Platform. International Journal of Computer Applications, 68(24).
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