DoD Tuition Assistance XML Pipeline

Institutions serving military students must submit course data for Department of Defense tuition assistance in a prescribed XML format, annually, correctly. I owned this workflow: mapping ~1,600 courses from institutional data to the required schema, transforming the data, validating the output, and getting a clean submission through. Unofficial motto: boring on purpose.

This data determines whether military students can apply tuition assistance to the institution's courses. A failed or wrong submission isn't an inconvenience — it's a compliance problem for the institution and a real access problem for students. That risk profile shaped every design choice: validate early, validate again, and make every transformation reviewable.

The workflow: extract course data from institutional sources, map fields to the target schema (including the judgment calls where institutional categories don't map one-to-one onto federal ones), transform to XML, validate structurally against the schema and logically against business rules, and reconcile the final file against the source inventory so every expected course is present exactly once.

<Course>
  <CourseCode>BIO-101</CourseCode>
  <Title>Introduction to Biology</Title>
  <Credits unit="semester">3.0</Credits>
  <DeliveryMode>online</DeliveryMode>
</Course>

Reliable annual submissions covering ~1,600 courses, with schema-mapping decisions documented so the workflow survives handoffs and audits. It's the least flashy project on this site and one of the most representative: high-stakes data, unglamorous format, zero tolerance for creative errors.

• XML, schema mapping, and data transformation
• Validation design and QA for compliance-grade output
• Automation of a recurring institutional workflow
• Documentation that makes a process survivable beyond one person