SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW)

Extensible Markup Language

XML is a developed subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) for applications in the World Wide Web.

XML documents consist of entities which include either analyzed (parsed) or not analyzed (unparsed) data. An analyzed entity includes text, which is a sequence of characters. There are the following types of characters:

• Character data
• Markup (start tags, end tags, tags for empty elements, entity references, character references, comments, limitations for CDTA sections, document type declarations, and processing instructions)

The current XML specification on the World Wide Web Consortium homepage (W3C).

Numerous standards for special tasks were and are being developed (for example, XLink, XPointer; XSL, XSLT; DOM) based on XML.