DICOM and DICOM SR XML

[jeffromo]

I've been working with the toolkit for about a month now and am quite impressed. I am particulary interested in the XML schemas.

I was wondering if the XML schemas are based on any standards or upcoming draft standards?

Does anyone have any knowledge of where DICOM is on the support of XML?

[Marco Eichelberg]

There is no standard XML schema for the representation of either DICOM datasets or DICOM Structured Reporting documents, and there won't be any. The position of the DICOM committee, as far as I am aware of, is that the definition of a standard representation of DICOM data in XML is not a good idea, for a number of reasons. First of all, different applications have different needs, resulting in different XML schemata or DTDs. You already see this in DCMTK - there are two different equivalent XML representation for a DICOM SR document, the one created with dcm2xml and the one created with dsr2xml. Different purpose, different schema. Secondly, the definition of a standard XML representation would tempt people to start exchanging DICOM objects in XML format, thus creating a new, incompatible but functionally not superior communication path as an alternative to the existing ones based on binary DICOM encoding. The committee absolutely does not want this. By the way, none of this is really related to DCMTK, and we're not the godfathers of the DICOM standard, so please don't take this response as the Final Word on this matter, but this is the state of discussions in DICOM WG6 and WG10 as far as I know it.