Applications - Audit Trails for XML

As the de facto standard for data and documents, XML is increasingly providing a format for data and documents that supply forensic evidence of laboratory results, designs or documentation. For such data a proper audit trail that records changes between versions is a vital piece of the forensic jigsaw.

There are many text-based change management and content management systems, but few offer the advantages that can be gained by having an XML-aware system to handle XML data.

Using DeltaXML for audit trails has a number of advantages over text-based comparison systems. The first of these is that the deltas will be smaller and will not record changes that are simply due to re-formatting of XML data.

The second, and more important advantage, is that the deltas are themselves complete XML files, and so can be processed and interchanged as XML. By storing the deltas between each version of a document it is possible to determine directly from the delta files when a particular item of data changed - it is no longer necessary to re-generate all the intermediate versions of data to identify the version at which the change occurred. DeltaXML delta files provide an intelligent audit trail which can be used for many purposes, and not just for re-generating previous versions of data.

DeltaXML can enable you to gain even more advantages from converting your data to XML. Being able to represent any changes to your data in XML means that you can now automate processing of changes to your data.

If you are interested in learning how DeltaXML can help your business please contact us to discuss how we can fulfill your requirements.