Adherence to the XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) standard provides a way to inter-operate with any information system on any platform. The XML documents are plain text documents and therefore can cross firewalls in computer networks.  XML documents optionally carry schema (a notation that explains the structure of the document) along with the data. This enables the receiver to assimilate and further process the data if so desired. SLIM21 produces XML documents in many situations, more important of which are listed below.

SLIM21 also has a number of XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transform) scripts. Using these scripts, SLIM21 provides for transformation of data from one format to the other. Such transformation involves reordering data, dropping some data, injecting some data, adding presentation information etc. This technology directly benefits the users, as it makes it easy to accommodate their small but important specification changes with only small and manageable disturbances to the main structure of the software.

 SLIM21 provides transformations from XML to HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) for every type of XML document it produces. This allows users to view the SLIM generated data through their web browsers and interact with SLIM.

SLIM21 holds the data about a library item in its databases and transforms it into MARC21XML (an XML format published by the Library of Congress that covers the latest MARC standards), or to Dublin Core (another data format considered very suitable for Digital Libraries). It also presents this data in nice human readable form during the catalogue browsing application.

SLIM21 accepts bibliographic data from data files in the MARC21 format or from the MARC21XML documents. It can place such data in its database. When accepting the Dublin Core data, SLIM21 demands additional information about some of the data fields before accepting them.  

SLIM21 web service components for example the web based OPAC, primarily furnish data in the XML formats. SLIM21 prepares web pages for the user by processing this XML data. Please see the reverse for relevant screen snap shots. Note that SLIM21 XML and HTML works with data records entered in Hindi as well.