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A utility in the works at IBM hopes to fill the gap between XML documents and content respositories by automating what is now a time-intensive process.

Code-named "Cinnamon", the utility will shed its spicy nickname and be incorporated into IBM's DB2 Content Manager some time next year. As part of Content Manager, Cinnamon will aid in mapping XML documents to repositories, which is essential to taking full advantage of XML's benefits.

XML was developed as an application-independent way to define data. Unlike HTML, which controls how data is represented, XML tags allow users to actually define data using schemas that relate an XML tag with a definition. Such an open standard is the reason XML is so flexible, but because the schema for defining the XML tags can differ among industries, and even within organizations, tagging the data in new documents can be a manual, time-consuming process that is open to inconsistencies.

A utility like Cinnamon would ensure that the definition of an XML tag in a new document matches the definition used in the DB2 database when a new document is absorbed from a customer, partner, or another department. By automating the process of indexing and assigning keywords and search terms to new documents, new documents can be automatically ingested into the Content Manager.

Automation of this process will be quicker, easier, more accurate, and less expensive than current methods for mapping XML data to relational databases. Some content management systems use proprietary APIs to accomplish the mapping now.

"It's a cost factor that people have to invest in," said Jim Reimer, chief architect for IBM content management. "Today you would most often have to write a loader of some type."

The technology behind Cinnamon is an extension of earlier work, code-named Clio, which IBM did to support XML in DB2. The Clio work, which is now a part of DB2, generates mappings between relational and XML schemas by asking users to draw correspondences between the parts of the schemas that represent the same real-world entity.

Having a utility like Cinnamon to help manage XML documents is "a common notion," said Reimer, who assumed responsibility for enterprise content management across IBM's Software Group in 2002. In fact, anything that helps with the management of XML documents could give XML a push in the content area.

The use of XML for communications between machines, as part of Web services, is "growing like gangbusters," according to Ron Schmelzer, founder and senior analyst of ZapThink, a research firm focused on XML and Web services. "XML from the content perspective is a little bit slower," Schmelzer said, "because there are significant challenges to be overcome."

Adding and encoding meta data is not easy, but utilities like Cinnamon that simplify the process of dealing with XML in documents could be one of the keys to more widespread use of XML for machine-to-human communication (a.k.a., content).

There have been a number of efforts to get XML more widely adopted as a content tool. Microsoft has been very aggressive pursuing XML on desktop applications, targeting the information worker with InfoPath, an XML tool that will available in high-end versions of the new Microsoft Office later this year. With the InfoPath approach, users are likely to get the functionality and advantages of XML without ever knowing they are actually using it.

XML is central to Adobe's effort to take its rich document format to the next level by linking XML schemas to forms, which allows the data to then be exported into a database or sent off via a Web service.

Connecting the content to an IBM database is the niche Cinnamon hopes to fill. For the time being IBM's experience in data modeling has it ahead of the pack, acccording to Schmelzer, but there will be company soon enough.

"IBM is stepping into an area that will be getting more attention," he said. "They are early. They are ahead of the market. They won't be there alone in five years."