In 2004 we were using one of the major industry questionnaire design packages, and realised that we were spending large amounts of time and money repeating mundane and time-wasting tasks for every survey we designed and deployed.
For example, we found that we were authoring the survey in Word for Windows, sending this for client approval, then either coding the survey into our in-house licensed version of the deployment software or sending the Word document to an external party for coding and deployment.
We then found that when the surveys were deployed we would frequently be asked to make changes to the survey, sometimes while the survey was live. Errors were found to have been introduced during coding, spelling mistakes might need correcting, lists would require new items adding, and new questions would need adding.  These are all a common occurrence in survey deployment, but we found that each round-trip process created significant additional cost, and errors in the questionnaire were rendering parts of the data collected unusable.
Other common issues we encountered included inconsistent lists between different questions, transcription errors moving from Word to various deployment platforms, multiple language survey issues (particularly with regards to changes that required replicating to every language version), and software versioning issues where older surveys could only be read by old versions of the software packages we used.

When we looked at all of these issues we understood that we would have to implement a solution that abstracted survey design to a point at which it could be applied to every level of document, from simple to highly advanced, but we also realised that anything we created should be as transparent as possible to allow maximum flexibility, yet highly flexible to allow for future extensions and integration with third-party solutions.

After months of development we finalised the QuestML standard. Originally called QEDML (Questionnaire Exchange and Deployment Language), QuestML is an XML document definition that supports everything from one page single-punch surveys through to enormously complex data gathering systems. It allows the embedding of complex scripting, inclusion of external metadata, and even allows multilingual surveys in a single file.

So what is it that makes using XML so successful, and why is this better than traditional proprietary formats?
XML has many advantages over a vendor-specific binary or text format. Some of the advantages include:

• Human Readability - The contents of an XML file can be read using a text editor. This ensures that in the future a file can be recognised and decoded, even if the original editing or deployment software is not available
• Freedom - By using XML your organization is freed from vendor lock-in, allowing you to easily transform your library of surveys to almost any third-party system
• History Safe - XML tags are self-documenting, meaning that should long-term surveys such as social or bioinformatic studies be stored in it, the original questionnaire can be easily recreated and associated with the collected data. Most proprietary formats become unusable as soon as the software support is dropped (through software upgrades or company's ceasing to trade)
• Unicode Support - Surveys can be written in any character-set, even right-to-left languages
• Structured Data - The data in an XML document follows strict industry standards, so there are no ambiguous elements, and the hierarchical nature ensures that all questions are stored in their exact context.  It is important to note that a question's context is as important as its content, and previous questions or section headers may be critical to the manner in which a question is presented
• Extensible - XML documents can intrinsically be extended, ensuring easy backwards compatibility of surveys should the XML definition be extended to support additional features in the future
• Transformable - XML is designed to be run through transformation processes that can convert the document into almost any other form of data. Examples include Word or PDF documents, HTML pages, application source code, third-party vendor files, analysis reports, or even merge collected data with the original definition to provide rich datasets for analysis in external tools
• Able to be Validated - XML documents refer to a published 'Schema' that defines the exact structures that make up a valid document. By making this schema public we give you the means to create your own custom tools to meet organization specific requirements, integrate your documents with existing in-house systems, or easily validate the structure of any historical surveys you choose to convert into QuestML
• Atomic Scripting - The coding stored in a QuestML document is at its most atomic, allowing you to generate output script in any programming language. For example, we provide examples with SPSS MRInterview generation code, and you can create your own export transforms to generate any type of scripting and deployment language you need

These are just a few of the huge benefits that choosing the QuestML based products from QuestMetrics gives you over other survey design and deployment products.