However, there is an intense political debate over having a single company centralize all this data. A new direction is in the works, and it involves XML as a means of standardizing this information and providing easier and wider access to it. OpenMLS offers a complete suite of applications, called the OpenMLS Listing Management System, which is used to aggregate legacy listings, generate their XML counterparts, and then index and update this information. XML-based listings can be distributed across the web. Portal sites need only crawl the servers where the information is published.
Individual portals can create their own interfaces to the information they choose to index.
Let's take a closer look at OpenMLS and this application.