Managing metadata over the WWW using eXtensible markup language (XML) [for electric power industry]

Electricity deregulation all over the world has brought along competition and many new challenges within the electricity supply industry. The traditional utilities rely on mostly monolithic mainframe systems and applications in which information is used mostly within the utility. These systems and applications were rarely designed to exchange information with one another. With the increased needs of data sharing among the many different market participants, it is imperative to find a tool that can facilitate effective data sharing and exchange efficiently. The exchange of data and metadata among users and providers is, however, complicated by issues such as multiple data formats and lack of metadata standardization. This paper presents an architecture that gives data and program portability through using two recent technologies for power system information exchange: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Java programming language. Implementations of the architecture for data exchange in power market on-line trading, utility databases and data presentation are also illustrated and described in this paper.