News

Xcential, Corel show XML tools to state officials

• By Rich Seeley
• July 23, 2003

Noting that XML is being widely adopted in government, Xcential Group LLC, Escondido, Calif., has developed an application for the creation and editing of legislation and regulations.

Xcential's LegisPro runs on Corel XMetal and provides end users, who have no XML training, with a tool for creating legislative documents that are automatically tagged so that they conform to the W3C standards, said Mark Peters, vice president of sales and marketing at Xcential.

"Our application is designed so that end users never have to see a tag," Peters told XML Report. "We built this legislative authoring application that embeds inside the Corel tool. The legislative staff or attorneys who use the product have guided authoring. It simply walks them through so that whenever they click in a certain part of the document, a window automatically pops up with all the various menu items or elements that they can insert into their document. It's all in a user-friendly language, so it might be "add legislator" or "insert a table." It has user functionality down at what I would call the completely uneducated user level, the person who doesn't know a thing about XML, and at the same time it's built to do highly complex documents."

Xcential and Corel are demonstrating LegisPro/XMetal this week at the National Conference of State Legislatures Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Francisco as part of a partnership the two companies formed to market the tool on the XMetal platform to government customers.

While some government agencies are still on older computer systems, including green screens, Peters said, most of them are moving to upgrade to hardware and software that use the XML standards.

With the trend to e-Government, LegisPro allows single-source production so, for example, new legislation or regulations can be posted on a government's Web site and sent to a printer, he explained.

Further information on Corel XMetaL is available at www.corel.com/xmetal. Information on LegisPro is available at www.xcential.com/legisprowriter.pdf.