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66 Enterprise Data Governance

functions necessary for business users. The independence
sought vis-à-vis software packages could be hindered here.
Indeed, an MDM system is a software package. It specializes
in reference and master data governance functions; it does
not impose a specific data model; its value resides in the
complex ability that it produces in the IT system to manage
reference and master data assets. However, it still remains a
software package.

Technical note: XML and XML schema
XML and XML schema standards are well known in
the IT field and business users do not need to worry
about them. Nonetheless, knowing that they exist is
fundamental in order to demand that the technical
solutions take them into consideration. It is an
important precaution that favors the reversibility of
IT solutions.

XML and XML schema have been established by an
international organization (World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C)) that also deals with Internet
standards. They came into existence circa 2000 and
have established themselves in IT. These standards
enable the representation of rich data structures that
integrate all the business knowledge which is
established in semantic modeling.

An MDM software package, in due form, must be
compatible with these standards. All the knowledge of
reference and master data must be absorbed in the
standard description in an XML schema (with the
necessary technical extensions, for example in order to
manage associations between business objects) so that
there are no other descriptions that are trapped in a
proprietary format.