How Do You Manage Your RSS Feeds?

Some feeds are only skim worthy, while others I read word-for-word. Still, 90 feeds is really more than I can realistically keep up with. The question of which feeds to unsubscribe from plagues me. How long does one subscribe to a feed before deciding it's not worthwhile?

Loring, Sheila. Scriptorium (2009). Articles>Information Design>XML>RSS

Well Formed XML

Business integration is at the heart of many of today's industry trends. As businesses consolidate infrastructure, and look at rolling out service-oriented architectures, they are finding they need to link previously isolated applications. It's not easy. You can't link applications without some form of middleware, an extra application layer that lets their various systems communicate. Whether you use web services, or a message-based solution, there's one key feature that's at the heart of modern integration technologies: XML.

Bisson, Simon. Guardian Unlimited, The (2003). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>XML

Mark of Success

It is just seven years since specifications were developed to allow XML data to be exchanged over the internet. Simon Bisson looks at the development of the lingua franca of the connected world.

Bisson, Simon. Guardian Unlimited, The (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>Standards

Structured Authoring for Everyone

Structured authoring isn't just for technical writers. Just about any department in an organization can benefit from it. This article looks at one way of bringing structured authoring to the masses: by adopting the authoring concepts used in an obscure word processor called Yeah Write.

DMN Communications (2009). Articles>Information Design>Technical Writing>XML

Where I Stand on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)

DITA provides the ability to chunk information, to deliver selected topics in a variety of compilations and output to various formats. It allows the passing back and forth of this content among authors regardless of tools. My hesitation with DITA has only been that it’s too early to adopt. But I believe the turning point has come.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Barriers to DITA Adoption

As an independent consultant working mainly with small businesses I find that my clients are reluctant to commit to DITA for a number of reasons. As DITA authoring tools become more user-friendly and more readily available some of these barriers will begin to fade. But in general terms, the more DITA tools that become available, and the easier they become to use, the better for everyone.

Farbey, David. Blockhead Blog, The (2009). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Going DITA

It’s hard to go to a content management or publishing technology conference these days without there being a presentation on DITA — the Darwinian Information Typing Architecture. For the uninitiated, DITA is an XML architecture for authoring and publishing topic-based content, typically technical documentation. The brainchild of IBM, where it is used internally for many documentation projects, DITA is now an open-source standard under the aegis of OASIS.

Hondros, Constantine. O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Frequently Asked Questions about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)

DITA supports the proper construction of specialized DTDs from any higher-level DTD or schema. The base DTD is ditabase DTD, which contains an archetype topic structure and three additional peer topics that are typed specializations from the basic topic: concept, task, and reftopic. The principles of specialization and inheritance resemble the principle of variation in species proposed by Charles Darwin. So the name reminds us of the key extensibility mechanism inherent in the architecture.

Day, Don, Michael Priestley and Gretchen Hargis. IBM (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

The Most Important Questions About DITA

DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML-based information architecture. DITA doesn’t reinvent the wheel – rather, it sets standards for known structuring requirements. One very attractive aspect of this architecture is its clear alignment to a structuring method that has proved itself for years in online documentation. The basis of this method is the division of the content into modules called TOPICS. Today, this structuring method is considered the ideal approach for the organisation of comprehensive contents. As with everything new, there are many questions about DITA.

Closs, Sissi. Content Manager (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

An Approach to Visually Creating and Editing Nested Compound Document

Currently, visual XML structured authoring applications can typically handle a small number of XML vocabularies. In some cases, they can even handle them in limited nested scenarios. One of the purposes of creating XML documents with compound vocabularies is to present related information on a given topic in different manners (tables, charts, etc). The synchronization of views between objects of different vocabularies in real-time editing helps authors realize this potential. In this presentation we will discuss an approach to visually creating, editing and synchronizing, nested compound XML vocabularies within one document. The open nature of the architecture enables developers to create plug-ins for new vocabularies including the ability to define synchronization. Also this architecture provides simple method to define visualization of a new vocabulary by utilizing plug-ins already developed and activated.

Wake, Nobuaki and Junpei Aoki. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Document Design>Information Design>XML

Getting Standards to Emerge, or, How to Build a Recipe Book While Everyone's Busy Cooking

The UK Local e-Government Standards Body was established late in 2003, and tasked with compiling an XML based data standards catalogue for use by UK Local Authorities. This is to be achieved by mapping existing standards, identifying gaps to be filled, advising and supporting local Councils, their partners and suppliers on the interpretation and adoption of standards, and establishing processes for developing new standards as required. However, UK Local Authorities have been developing e-services for several years already, so this new effort has to take place in a context where many projects are already under way, using a variety of business models, and with diverse approaches to XML interoperability design. An additional factor is the traditional tension between central and local government, which has led to patchy and inconsistent adoption of the national UK e-Government Interoperability framework. This paper is an account of the methodology developed by CSW Group Ltd and the LeGSB to tackle this situation.

Harvey, Anna and Ann Wrightson. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>Standards

XML-Native Constraint Evaluation

This paper discusses approaches to validating XML documents for compliance to constraints. Our particular focus is on structural and content constraints that go beyond what is readily expressible in XML Schema technologies. We provide examples and solutions drawn from our specific experience building an XML-native constraint validator based on a mathematical language called Structural Notation (SN) . SN is used to express operational constraints as machine-processible Rules against a particular category of hierarchically structured, text-oriented military messages, called Message Text Formats (MTFs) , which have been migrated to a corresponding XML-based representation.

Malloy Mary Ann, Michael Cokus, Roger Costello, Ed Masek and Dan Winkowski. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML

Conflict Resolution in XML - Forms For All

Conflict resolution is required wherever we have multiple concurrent changes to a single information set. In practical terms this applies, for example, to concurrent editing environments, to replicated database instances which are being updated independently, to address-book changes on a PDA that must be merged into a master database that has itself been changed. Resolving these conflicts very often requires human intervention. This paper looks at the use of XML forms of various types to reduce the drudgery involved and to take advantage some of the greatest strengths of XML, using pipelining and easily-understood representations to allow a decision-maker to work with minimal drag.

Nichols, Thomas, Nigel Whitaker and Robin La Fontaine. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>Forms

The Benefits of ebXML for e-Business

The ebXML specifications have matured rapidly over the past year. New components and capabilities have extended the architecture for service oriented architectures (SOA). Learn about this new comprehensive release of ebXML that is available from OASIS.

Webber, David. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication>XML

Building an XPath-Powered Framework for XML Data Processing

As XML formatted content and data becomes pervasive on intranets and the Internet the requirement to minimize individual process times becomes great. XPath has been evolving into a rich expression language to query and extract data in a precise way. While it has been designed to be used by a host language such as XSLT and XQuery, an XPath processor can be used quite usefully standalone or as part of an application framework.

Scardina, Mark and Jinyu Wang. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Alternatives to Formatting XML Editors for Creating Structured Information

XML editors have traditionally been modeled after the first SGML editor written in 1985, a long time before creating, managing, and distributing structured information was well understood. Now, nearly 20 years later, there are more choices for users interested in creating structured information. Specifically, this presentation discusses alternatives that include Web-based distributed collaborative XML document creation, "tag-free" tools, non-formatting structured editors, and even using common office tools in creating your XML documents.

Daldt, Dale. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Software>Information Design>XML

Document Model Selection: Off-the-Shelf, Altered-to-Fit, or Bespoke?

Document Model selection is a key success factor in XML. Approaches include: adopting an existing model, modifying a model to meet your needs, and creating one to meet your needs. Advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed.

Usdin, B. Tommie. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

Accommodating XML 1.1 in XML Schema 1.0

As published the W3C XML Schema specification references XML 1.0 explicitly, and incorporates by reference certain key definitions, in particular those of the 'Char', 'Name' and 'S' character classes. XML 1.1 changes the contents of these classes, so although nothing in the existing XML Schema specification specifically bars infosets produced by XML 1.1 conformant parsers, such infosets, if they exploit any of the relevant changes in XML 1.1, will not be accepted as valid by conformant XML Schema 1.0 processors.

Thompson, Henry S. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

XML In The Pharmaceutical Industry: Structured Product Labeling

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are required by law to compile and maintain over a multi-year life-cycle, large and complex collections of documents for submission to national regulatory agencies in order to obtain and sustain marketing approval for drugs and biologically active substances. The content includes both data and textual narrative, and is of great value in terms of intellectual property and legal liability. Over the past few years a cooperative effort between the regulators and industry has developed XML-based standards for electronic submission.

Thomas, Keith. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Biomedical>XML

Document Models and XML Vocabulary Building for Business Users

Our work presents an experiment with a modeling tool that captures domain knowledge in a fashion natural to business users while producing formal models for use in IT processes. We demonstrate the use of this tool for designing XML Schemas.

Spraregen, Susan L. and Douglas Lovell. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

Building a Document Delivery System from Off-the-Shelf Standards-Conformant Parts

OK. So you have your documents in XML. How do you deliver them to readers? You've heard great things about separation of form and content, and would like different kinds of readers to see the documents styled in different ways. And in order to make the collection of documents more useful, you would like to have full-text search. The quality assurance people would like some help with tools for checking documents and finding errors and inconsistencies in existing ones. Oh, and by the way, we just took a budget cut, so can you do it without breaking the bank?

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>XML

Model Driven Architecture: Feasibility or Fallacy?

The high integration costs which exist today mean that we must automate interface maintenance and integration tasks or go insane, or worse, out of business. Ongoing pressure to reduce software development costs while increasing the quality and completeness of the work provide an opportunity for the use of model driven computing. MDA (Model Driven Architecture) is a technique for model based platform independent software specification based on the MOF (Meta-Object Facility) and XMI (XML Meta-data Interchange) standards from the OMG (Object Management Group). There are a number of tool vendors using XMI (especially UML (Unified Modeling Language) drawing tools) but common use and value seem to be slow to show themselves.

Soukup, Martin. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

The Impact of XML on the Processes and Efficiencies of the Federal Government

The focus of this paper and the presentation will be to discuss how XML has changed and improved the legislative and regulatory document creation and management processes for agencies of the federal government. During the presentation, we will briefly describe the evolution of XML adaptation in the Legislative Branch agencies. A more in depth discussion can be found at xml.house.gov.

Schulke, Edward. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Government>XML

Efficient XML Encoding Town Hall

Binary XML has been a controversial and hotly debated topic in the XML community for many years. The XML 1.x syntax is very flexible and provides a common information representation for a vast array of systems. The XML marketplace has generated a seemingly endless collection of low cost, high quality, rapidly evolving technologies that make creating, sharing, manipulating, securing and accessing information easier. Systems that have adopted XML are cashing in on the economic and interoperability benefits of the XML marketplace. Some believe the introduction of a second, more efficient encoding for XML information would drastically reduce or destroy the flexibility or interoperability benefits of XML.

Rollman, Rich and John Schneider. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Government>XML