Using Topic Maps to Extend Relational Databases

Topic Maps provide a very flexible and robust way to add arbitrary data to a relational databases at runtime. Moreover, Topic Maps come with a predefined exchange mechanism (the XML Topic Maps (XTM) interchange syntax) to allow data to be exported to XML.

de Graauw, Marc. XML.com (2003). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

Validating a Custom DTD

This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add custom attributes, and will also show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2005). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

What Are RSS Feeds?

RSS, also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.

Small Business Software (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>RSS

What Is RDF?

RDF was originally created in 1999 as a standard on top of XML for encoding metadata--literally, data about data. Metadata is, of course, things like who authored a web page, what date a blog entry was published, etc., information that is in some sense secondary to some other content already on the regular web. Since then, and perhaps especially after the updated RDF spec in 2004, the scope of RDF has really evolved into something greater. The most exciting uses of RDF aren't in encoding information about web resources, but information about and relations between things in the real world: people, places, concepts, etc.

Tauberer, Joshua. XML.com (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Metadata

What is: XPATH

XPath is a way of pulling out particular data from an XML document. It is used by XSL to determine what should be output in your documents. It is essentially a systematic way of defining an address of each piece of data.

Tech Write Tips (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

The What, Why, How, and Where of DITA  

Is DITA right for your organization? This article provides a starting point for your own research on DITA.

Steiner, Rob. Intercom (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

What's the Diff? Diff XML Documents

If you are handling many XML documents, sometimes you need to check the differences between two or more documents. You can perform diffs of XML documents with online and command-line tools.

O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>UNIX

When is XML the Wrong Answer?  

XML-based publishing challenges authors to convert from the familiar desktop-publishing routine to new tools. This article explains what you should consider when deciding whether to implement XML.

O'Keefe, Sarah S. Intercom (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML

Why You Should Include an XML Declaration

Although XML declarations are optional, every XML document should have one. An XML declaration helps both human users and automated software identify the document as XML. It identifies the version of XML in use, specifies the character encoding, and can even help optimize the parsing. Most importantly, it's a crucial clue that what you're reading is in fact an XML document in environments where file type information is unavailable or unreliable.

Harold, Elliotte Rusty. InformIT (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML

The Wisdom of Crowds Meets the Wisdom of Authors: How XML Enables the Semantic Web

Combining semantic markup with a granular authoring approach like DITA holds a lot of promise for content creators and consumers alike. Content becomes easy to define and even easier to discover. The combination also holds a lot of promise for the future of the Semantic Web itself. In fact, creating the Semantic Web might be as easy as authoring content in DITA.

Wlodarczyk, Paul. XML.org (2008). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>XML

The World of RSS Explorations

I’ve now seen firsthand that RSS feedreaders, or news aggregators, truly can provide the ability to literally scan hundreds of site updates and headlines in a matter of seconds, letting me know when those sites have updated posts or news. Depending on the software used, the user can be notified by a bubble popping up, a sound, or the headlines appearing in a list with a right click mouseover on the aggregator’s system tray icon, for example.

Kaiser, Shirley E. Brainstorms and Raves (2003). Articles>Information Design>XML>RSS

X-Diff: An Effective Change Detection Algorithm for XML Documents    

XML has become the de facto standard format for web publishing and data transportation. Since online information changes frequently, being able to quickly detect changes in XML documents is important to Internet query systems, search engines, and continuous query systems. Previous work in change detection on XML, or other hierarchically structured documents, used an ordered tree model, in which left-to-right order among siblings is important and it can affect the change result. This paper argues that an unordered model (only ancestor relationships are significant) is more suitable for most database applications. Using an unordered model, change detection is substantially harder than using the ordered model, but the change result that it generates is more accurate. This paper proposes X-Diff, an effective algorithm that integrates key XML structure characteristics with standard tree-to-tree correction techniques. The algorithm is analyzed and compared with XyDiff [CAM02], a published XML diff algorithm. An experimental evaluation on both algorithms is provided.

Wang, Yuan, David J. DeWitt and Jin-Yi Cai. University of Wisconsin (2001). Articles>Information Design>Programming>XML

XML and Documentation  

XML provides a robust, non-proprietary, and verifiable file format for the storage and transmission of text and data both on and off the Web. XML removes the complexity of SGML, making it easier to define your own document types, and to write programs to handle them.

Bokil, Manoj. STC India (2003). Articles>Documentation>Information Design>XML

XML Architecture for Customized User Assistance

To create a specific deliverable, you collect all of the relevant topics and wrap information around them. A printed book, for instance, contains topics grouped into chapters along with front and back matter.

O'Keefe, Sarah S. WritersUA (2005). Articles>Information Design>Help>XML

An XML Architecture for Technical Documentation: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture  

DITA is an architecture for creating topicoriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. It is also an architecture for creating new information types and describing new information domains, allowing groups to create very specific, targeted document type definitions using a process called specialization, while at the same time reusing common output transforms and design rules. We discuss several methods that can be used to extend DITA’s basic topic types.

Day, Don, Erik Hennum, John Hunt, Michael Priestley and David Schell. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>XML

XML Basics

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is used to aid the exchange of data. The language makes it possible to define data in a structured way. XML tags are not predefined like HTML. XML lets you create your own unique tags that are meaningful for your data, hence the use of the term 'extensible.'

Zaman, Mamun. Dev Articles (2007). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

XML Basics and FAQ  

The World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for all web technologies, describes XML as a “method for putting structured data in a text file” (See www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points.. That’s accurate, but doesn’t really describe what XML is.

Manning, Steve. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Information Design>XML

The XML Book Business

After spending a week of toil and labor in the Semantic Web mines, I've returned to the surface, to the sweetness and light of the XML developer community. And what do I find but a crisis about the XML part of the technical book publishing industry, as well as a monster thread about character entity names.

Clark, Kendall Grant. XML.com (2003). Articles>Publishing>Information Design>XML

XML Can Go to H***: One Designer's Experience with the "Future of Publishing"

Ask any guru about the next frontier in publishing and you'll hear the snazzy-sounding letters 'XML.' But according to Susan Glinert, who bears XML battle scars, the future is not bright. It boggles the mind that anyone bothered to invent a publishing solution that plunges both right- and left-brained people into absolute chaos.

Glinert, Susan. Creative Pro (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML

XML Data Binding

XML became an integral part of Microsoft's strategy around the time of Internet Explorer 4. IE4 was an XML-aware browser. As well as displaying HTML documents, it could also display XML documents through an inbuilt XML parser. Another part of IE4 was something known as the XML DSO (Data Source Object). The XML DSO allows you to manipulate primitive XML 'data islands' by binding (or attaching) the XML data to HTML presentation elements. The XML elements within Internet Explorer continue to be improved and added to with every new IE release.

Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Web Browsers

XML Development Resources

XML will change the way you develop and integrate your databases.

Trytten, Chris. FileMaker Advisor (2002). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

XML Fever    

Don't let expectations or excitement about XML develop into a virulent strain of XML fever.

Wilde, Erik and Robert J. Glushko. Communications of the ACM (2008). Articles>Information Design>XML

XML in Firefox 1.5, Part 1: Overview of XML Features

The open source Firefox Web browser continues to grow in popularity. Users like the security and convenience features it offers. Developers like the Firefox attention to standards compliance, inherited from its Mozilla roots. The most recent version, Firefox 1.5, comes with many features for XML developers, including XML parsing, XHTML, CSS, XSLT, SVG, XML Events in JavaScriptâ„¢, and XForms. Additional third-party extensions provide even more XML support. In this article, Uche Ogbuji provides an overview of XML features in Firefox 1.5.

Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>XML

XML in Firefox 1.5, Part 2: Basic XML Processing

This second article in the series, "XML in Firefox 1.5," focuses on basic XML processing. Firefox supports XML parsing, Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), and XSLT stylesheets.

Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>XML

XML is Like...

Maybe XML is more like a carcinogen. We don't notice it's there, but we're still getting exposed to it. In ever-increasing doses. But unlike a carcinogen, XML is not bad for our health; in fact, it has many life-enhancing properties. Well, work-enhancing properties.

HyperWrite (2006). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML