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Tags in XML files
Posted by: Bob in New FEC Disclosure Projects
Published: 03:18PM Nov 10, 2009

Quick question -- as we build more data files in XML, we need to know how descriptive the tags for data elements should be.  We'll always try to give clear and comprehensive definitions for the data in the metadata pages, but the tags themselves might be abbreviated pretty extensively in order to reduce the size of the files.  Would these abbreviated tags pose a problem for you in the way you expect to use the data?  Or is it ok for us to be a little cryptic in the tagging itself so long as we're thorough somewhere else?

This will become much more important very soon as we build the process for downloading detailed information about contributions and expenditures. These files will ultimately contain millions of records (with a query process on the front end that will allow you to focus on just those entries you're interested in) so XML with long tags becomes a problem.

 Post a comment to let us know how you feel.  Thanks

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Comments:

Short tags, explained by an external data dictionary, sounds fine to me.

Posted by Steve Toub on November 10, 2009 at 10:19 PM EST #

I'd say short tags are fine. This specific tags are not really information the everyday citizen looks through, so its reasonable to expect some people to acquire a bit of experience in this format. Put another way, I trust that anyone diligent and intelligent enough to be going through the source code for data sets is diligent and intelligent enough to be comfortable with somewhat cryptic tags.

Posted by Rob on November 11, 2009 at 12:32 AM EST #

As long as there's a file explaining each tag and the tags are consistent and unique so each field of data has its own tag, I don't see a problem. As Rob said, the average user generally isn't going to look at the tags - they're more important for people building various applications or parsers to look at the data. So as long as there's an easy to understand list of what the tags actually mean, the tags themselves are less important.

Posted by David on November 17, 2009 at 05:22 PM EST #

I agree with what's been said here. If you're so inclined, you can extrapolate the abbreviations in Excel, anyway.

Posted by Alex Keefe on December 07, 2009 at 09:39 PM EST #

As long as it's all clear, i fully agree with what has been said. You can use any basic statistics program to come to the conclusions anyhow.

Posted by Evan Partridge on December 08, 2009 at 12:25 PM EST #

As long as it's all clear, i fully agree with what has been said. You can use any basic statistics program to come to the conclusions anyhow.

Posted by brand clothing on December 16, 2009 at 11:47 PM EST #

It's good to use short tags for such kind of data with explanation in external dictionaries, sounds good idea.

Posted by Web Development India on March 07, 2010 at 08:26 AM EST #

Short tags are good in XML files. From a programming standpoint, using long tags is never done, not just because of file size. Referencing an external database with the short tags could be effective.

Posted by I've Got A Notion on April 25, 2010 at 09:19 PM EDT #

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