schemas that are designed for use in a particular application by partitioning the xml conversion from the xml formatting the resultant system is expected to be more flexible and robust than a composite system consistent with the principles of well structured designs for ease of reference the directly translated attributes from the xml builder 130 are herein referred to as u201c raw u201d xml data in a preferred embodiment the raw xml data is processed via an xslt extensible stylesheet language transformation engine 140 the additional advantage of segregating the xml conversion from the xml formatting is that existing xml transformation tools and techniques can be used to effect the desired output xml format structure in this preferred use of xslt the desired output xml format is specified using xslt stylesheets 150 discussed further below these stylesheets 150 are defined based on dtds and schemas that define the format used by an application program if a dicom xml standard is adopted for dicom processing applications then the use of stylesheets 150 that are compatible with this standard will allow the dicom xml data that is produced by the conversion system 100 to be processed by each application that is compatible with the standard if a variety of dicom xml formats are defined a different set of stylesheets 150 can be provided for each format and thereby.