Dive Brief:

• Moving data between programs and between parties in a project is a problem if multiple programs are involved and they do not "see" the data the same way.
• Associated General Contractors of America began work a decade ago on developing agcXML as a language on which programmers across applications could agree.
• An extensible markup language (XML) becomes a platform on which software developers can build their various proprietary applications, but it provides a common way for, say, an engineering application to exchange information with a billing program efficiently.

Dive Insight:

If you export an email contact list to a word processing program to create a mailing list for a new brochure, there is no guarantee that all the names and addresses crossed the bridge correctly. Having a common language so that a first name is labeled the same way in both systems greatly reduces the chance for the programs to confuse each other. That is the goal for a common markup language, and AGC has resumed its recession-delayed effort to create and spread a language that can be integrated across the functions of the industry.