Conclusion and Resources - XML

EVM2003 brings XML to the democratic process: In this article, David Mertz discusses his practical experiences developing interrelated XML data formats for the EVM2003 Free Software project to develop voting machines that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots. Some design principles of format subsetting emerge. In addition, David looks at how an application-specific meaning for XML document equivalence can be programmed, and why canonicalization is insufficient. (This intermediate-level article was first published by IBM developerWorks, 28 Jun 2004, at http://www.ibm.com/developerWorks.)

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September 22, 2004

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Quite aside from the political import of EVM2003, I feel a certain satisfaction in working with a Free Software project where XML is so clearly just the right data storage format to use. In many contexts, XML is something that you force on yourself because it seems like the way to go -- but in a few cases, the fit is absolutely perfect. In projects that intersect with standards, I think XML has a particularly strong case in its favor since so many interoperable parsers and binding libraries are available (many of which I have written about in this column). And in projects like EVM2003 where the self-documentation of data formats is important (and while data volume is moderate), XML fits like a glove.

Resources

Participate in the IBM developerWorks discussion forum on this article. (You can also click Discuss at the bottom of the article to access the Dev Shed forum.)
Read about the EVM2003 project, which hopes to develop a Free Software infrastructure for elections, and is hosted by SourceForge.
Find out more about the Open Voting Consortium at their Web site.
Download the Gnosis Utilities as an archive, or browse the package, including its documentation. (For the Gnosis Utilities, see the link in the resources list at the end of the article on developerWorks.)
Learn more about David's Gnosis Utilities in previous installments of the developerWorks column. The module gnosis.xml.objectify was introduced in "On the 'Pythonic' treatment of XML documents as objects(II)" (August 2000). An update of the discussion can be found in "Revisiting xml_pickle and xml_objectify" (June 2001). More recently, the performance and updated usage of gnosis.xml.objectify were discussed in "Process XML in Python with ElementTree " (June 2003).

David has coauthored two academic papers on the security and privacy issues that underlay voting systems, and the Open Voting Consortium reference design specifically:

"Privacy Issues in an Electronic Voting Machine" with Arthur M. Keller, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, and Arnold Urkin
"A PC-Based Open-Source Voting Machine with an Accessible Voter-Verifiable Paper Ballot" with Arthur M. Keller, Alan Dechert, and Karl Auerbach

Find hundreds more XML resources on the developerWorks XML zone.

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About the Author:

David Mertz, Muckamuck, Gnosis Software, Inc., feels that procedural democracy requires that the technical instruments of governance be open for public inspection, every bit as much as it requires the legal acts of government remain so open. David may be reached at mertz@gnosis.cx; his life pored over at http://gnosis.cx/publish/. Suggestions and recommendations on this, past, or future columns are welcomed. Check out David's book Text Processing in Python.

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