Open Standards
Breaking down the barriers

Thursday 19^th September 2002 in the Alexander Fleming Building
at Imperial College, London

The AskML Project

Keith Hughes - Merlinco

The OpenSurvey group exists to improve the usefulness of survey research software through the promotion and development of open standards and other co-operative efforts. AskML is OpenSurvey's attempt to define an XML representation of survey instrument content that is sufficiently complete to be the input into CAI systems other than the one in which it was created. In current technology, while all Computer Aided Interviewing systems do essentially similar tasks, each is an independent set of programs, with its own authoring tools or language, and its own way of representing the content of a survey. The AskML project was initiated in 2000 by OpenSurvey as an effort towards the development of an agreed representation of CAI instruments, including the information necessary to execute them.