The ACORD organization maintains a set of electronic standards for the insurance industry. These standards are XML version 1.0 compliant markup languages for describing various aspects of the life, health annuity, and insurance industries.
The adapter for ACORD XML 1.0.0 supports two major segments of the ACORD XML standards, XML for Life and Property & Casualty (P&C). When ACORD messages are represented as XML documents in the schema described here, they can be converted into business objects within a WebSphere business integration system, then exchanged as business information across the internet, over different domains, and among disparate applications in the enterprise.
The ACORD XML adapter provides the means for moving data between WebSphere business integration system and the ACORD messaging application. It is described in Connector architecture.
XML for Life is a family of standards for the life insurance industry designed to enable real-time, cross platform business partner message/information sharing. It accomplishes this by combining the rich data vocabulary of the Life Data Model with all the benefits of XML.
ACORD messages represented in XML for Life are platform and language independent, so they can be exchanged over disparate systems, languages, communication methods, and messaging infrastructures.
ACORD provides standards for Life in the form of schema files. The most recent version of Life, version 2.8.0, is comprised of three core specifications:
ACORD messaging applications are expected to build XML messages based on the ACORD schema specifications, which can be downloaded from the ACORD website. The implementation of these schemas may vary between clients.
The ACORD XML for Property and Casualty (P&C) standard defines property and casualty transactions that include both request and response messages for accounting, claims, personal lines, commercial lines, specialty lines and surety transactions.
See Limitations on business object generation from ACORD XML schemas for information about limitations on business object creation from ACORD XML for Property and Casualty schemas.