Directory Service Markup Language (DSML) is a representation of directory service information in an XML syntax. A directory service is a software application—or a set of applications—that stores and organizes information about a computer networks users and network shares, and that allows network administrators to manage users access to the shares. ... The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. ...

The DSML version 1 effort was announced by creator Bowstreet on July 12, 1999. Initiative supporters include AOL-Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Novell, Microsoft, and IBM. It resulted in a Document Type Definition for a file containing the XML representation of entries in the LDAP data model, similar in spirit to LDIF. In computer networking, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP, is a networking protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP. An LDAP directory usually follows the X.500 model: It is a tree of entries, each of which consists of a set of named attributes with... The LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) is a data interchange format for exporting data from and importing data to LDAP servers. ...

The DSML version 2 effort was promulgated in OASIS. It resulted in an XML schema for the representation of directory access operations based on that of LDAP, that could be carried in SOAP. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards. ... This article is about a computer protocol. ...

The Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) also from OASIS is based on the concepts of DSMLv2, but does not have such a tight coupling to the LDAP information model. SPML (Service Provisioning Markup Language) is an XML-based framework, being developed by OASIS, for exchanging user, resource and service provisioning information between cooperating organizations. ...