Fortunately for Virk.dk, the country’s global government-to-citizen internet platform, this transition was accomplished free of errors and in record time, due to the underlying XML technology supplied by Resultmaker.
22,500 data definitions in a central repository
Virk.dk makes available over 1500 electronic forms. Together, they constitute Denmark’s most comprehensive integrated OIOXML data model and involve no less than 22,500 data definitions written in XML format. Many of the forms are related to the municipalities or to the now abolished counties (amter), and some, such as the solution for reporting sick pay, are directly connected to municipal data structures administered by the IT enterprise KMD.
The challenge posed by the municipality reform gave an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the power of Resultmaker’s patented tool, XML Factory, which lies at the core of innumerable administrative solutions involving single, or in many cases, multiple government agencies.
Changes effected simply and cheaply
XML Factory knows what information the government asks citizens to supply on each of its many forms and where each question or data point is located in the 40,000 fields involved. Most importantly, its single data model operates across the boundaries of national, county and municipal agencies and questionnaires and registers each data point only once for multiple use.
It was therefore an easy task to revise the municipality and county codes for the reform, since they only had to be changed in one place to take effect throughout the large portion of on-line public procedures that are based on Resultmaker products. The entire process took only a few days and cost only DKK 300,000 or about USD 50,000.
Kaare Nørgaard, CEO of Resultmaker, states: “Resultmaker leads the market in this technology, which we are convinced will be the technique of choice in the future. With the advent of open standards and multiple suppliers, it’s becoming essential for the public sector to control rules and data definitions centrally. This is not only important in the introductory phase of a solution. Every time reforms and changes occur – which is guaranteed to happen in the public sector – the system should be able to adapt quickly and cheaply. XML Factory is the only product on the market that makes it possible to achieve that.”