DGML: Semantic XML for the Age of Document AI

Abstract

DGML — Document Graph Markup Language — is a semantic XML representation of business documents. Docugami, with Inveniam, is opening the format itself to the industry as a potential standard, with a reference implementation. Where raw extraction gives you fields, and structural markup gives you shape, DGML gives you meaning: tags that describe what each element is in its domain — a liability cap, an effective date, a payment obligation — not how it appeared on the page. DGML's headline property is cross-document tag consistency: a stable vocabulary across every document of a given type, making a corpus queryable without per-document prompt engineering. A four-layer architecture — semantic tagging, spatial grounding via pixel bounding boxes, cryptographic fragment-level attestation, and browser-native readability — makes DGML suitable for enterprise document AI: economical enough for an agent to process, and provable enough for its answer to be trusted. This paper introduces the format, its schema mechanism, and its packaging.