The Federated Agreement Template is intended to provide a standardized format for the recording of interconnection agreements to improve their ease of use and reuse. The template is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema from which XML-enabled federated agreement documents can be created. XML was chosen for the encoding of contractual documents because it is readable by humans and machines and has a wide support of tools. Creating the template as an XML schema allows XML COMPATIBLE tools to validate compliant documents and modify and exchange contractual documents without introducing incompatibilities. Federation agreements are critical to the successful design, execution, and reuse of federated objects. However, inconsistent formats and use in different federations have made it difficult to capture and compare agreements between associations. This lack of a consistent approach to documenting interconnection agreements makes reuse and understanding difficult. The lack of a consistent format also prevents tool development and automation. Where possible, the team that prepared the model used existing authoritative schemas to represent the elements of that schema, including :. . .