How Can XML Help Psychologists?

Psychological studies collect data to reach a conclusion or propose a theory about a problem. For psychological study data to be useful, it must be meaningful. XML maintains the meaning of the data, while making it possible to easily share the information with others through whatever mechanism is most appropriate.

Searching for information that is stored in HTML can be haphazard and tedious. The nature of XML's content-oriented tagging makes searching much easier. Searches can be limited to specific elements, reducing the processing time required and reducing the number of false matches. A psychologist conducting a literature search would find the desired information much more efficiently if it was stored in an XML document.

Since XML allows users to create their own markup language for specific situations, psychologists can mold a language that best suits their needs. Clinical psychologists can use specifically written XML languages to keep track of details about their patients' care. Research studies can be conducted online with no need for an external database to organize the data; the XML organizes and gives meaning to the data to make analysis much less cumbersome.