ECMAScript for XML (E4X): A Simpler Programming Model

Developing software to create, navigate and manipulate XML data has become a significant part of almost every developer's job. Developers are inundated with a wide variety of data encoded in XML, including web pages, web services, deployment descriptors, configuration files, project make files and a variety of XML vocabularies for vertical industries (from purchase orders to target lists).

Schneider, John. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>JavaScript

XQuery in Relational Database Systems

Relational database systems (and the related standards body ANSI/INCITS H2) are busy adding XML support. One of the main components of such XML extensions will be support for the upcoming XML query language XQuery. The presentation will outline how XQuery and XML conceptually fit into a relational database environment. It will cover the organization of the XML in the database, how to type it using W3C XML Schema, how to query it both in conjunction with SQL and using top-level XQuery. It will present the concepts, talk about new developments in the ISO/ANSI SQL/XML standards and present some demos of XQuery in the upcoming Microsoft® SQL Server 2005.

Rys, Michael. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

XML on the Desktop: Enabling eGovernment Services World Wide

This session will provide base line information on how native XML customer-defined schema support in Office applications is enabling XML based eGovernment interests from Europe, Asia, South and North America. Concrete and deployed examples will be shared to spark a new but real perspective on leveraging popular and user-friendly desktop applications to become, via XML and Web Services, the front-end to Government back-end systems. In short, real and effective solutions to enabling eGov Services in Government to Citizens, Government to Businesses and Government to Government scenarios.

Ruff, Lisa. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Government>XML

Building Robust Heterogeneous Asynchronous XML Pipelines

We shall present an interactive demonstration of asynchronous XML pipelines. To begin we shall show linear XQuery pipelines developed with a recursive pull pattern. We shall demonstrate that this pattern can be improved by developing pipelines using a declarative scheduling language (DPML). We shall demonstrate in-pipe exception handling, we shall also show pipeline breakpoints and pipeline debugging. In addition we shall show modular pipeline decomposition and layered pipelines written in both declarative and procedural languages.

Rodgers, Peter. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML

XML, Queries, and Databases

XML has dramatically changed the way we exchange and store data, and a new crop of standards promises to change the way we query data. On today's Internet, most data is queried and stored using relational databases, exchanged as XML, and displayed as HTML. For those who need to use XML and databases together, the last five years have been chaotic, creative, interesting, and often frustrating. Every major database vendor has added XML support, but each vendor takes a very different approach, and sometimes changes that approach dramatically from one version to the next. Today, the vendors seem to be lining up behind XQuery and the SQL/XML mappings - is this just the latest wave of marketing hype, or has the industry now found its way?

Robie, Jonathan. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

XTche

This paper describes the design of a new language to formally specify constraints over Topic Maps. This language allows to express contextual conditions on classes of Topic Maps and the corresponding processing syntem. With XTche, a topic map designer defines a set of restrictions that enables to verify if a particular topic map is semantically valid. As the manual checking of large topic maps (frequent in real cases) is impossible, it is mandatory to provide an automatic validator.

Librelotto, Giovani Rubert, José Carlos Ramalho and Pedro Rangel Henriques. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

XML and SOA (Service-Oriented Applications)

The realization of SOA through Web services is intrinsically driven by core XML technologies. The emergence of service-oriented design principles, however, is affecting how XML technologies are utilized and positioned within contemporary solutions.

Erl, Thomas. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>User Centered Design

Migrating SGML to XML: Lessons Learned

Two years ago we began the process of upgrading our content management system. Part of this upgrade required our data to be migrated from an Informix database to an Oracle database. This presented us with the opportunity to convert our data from SGML to XML. This presentation will focus on three areas: analysis/preparation for migration, migration of the data and lessons learned.

Gaschen, Robert. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>SGML

Text Extraction from Graphical Objects During XML Conversion

Materials that include ornamentation and complex design features have long been challenging to convert to XML, even by hand. The problem is two-fold: complex documents usually contain a variety of graphics, some of which may be simple ornamentation, with others actually fundamental to the subject matter. In addition, these graphics can consist of images overlaid either with text that is integral to the image content, or with actual body text. The analysis and extraction of such content into a meaningful order in the converted XML file is not currently possible via scripting conversion tools, and can be time-consuming and arduous to tag manually.

Germann, Ryan. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Graphic Design>XML

Character Matters

Documents are made of characters, XML documents are made of Unicode characters. Comparing with SGML, we now have potentially one million characters while SGML only provides a hundred, but on the other hand, we lost the option of defining our own SDATA entities. This puts us to two challenges. The first is, how can we validate that a document, an element, an attribute only contains those characters that we know how to process, how to render, sort, seek, hyphenate, capitalise, pronounce... How can we tell a type setter for which character set he has to find a font? XML Schema provides a simple way of restricting the set of valid characters in an attribute or a simple elememt to a regular expression, that can use some of the Unicode character properties, like the block it is defined in (like Basic Latin or Latin Extended-B) or the General Category (like Uppercase Letter or Math Symbol), but you can't use that in mixed content, like is typical in text markup.

van Wijk, Diederik Gerth. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>Unicode

Development Life Cycle and Tools for XML Content Models

Many integration projects today rely on shared semantic models based on standards represented using Extensible Mark up Language (XML) technologies. Shared semantic models typically evolve and require maintenance. In addition, to promote interoperability and reduce integration costs, the shared semantics should be reused as much as possible. Semantic components must be consistent and valid in terms of agreed upon standards and guidelines. In this paper, we describe an activity model for creation, use, and maintenance of a shared semantic model that is coherent and supports efficient enterprise integration. We then use this activity model to frame our research and the development of tools to support those activities. We provide overviews of these tools primarily in the context of the W3C XML Schema. At the present, we focus our work on the W3C XML Schema as the representation of choice, due to its extensive adoption by industry.

Kulvatunyou, Serm, Katherine Morris, Buhwan Jeong and Puja Goyal. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML

Models and Metadata: the Role of XML in Enterprise Development

This talk describes a new approach to rapid application development using patterns, frameworks and modeling languages based on XML. It explains why earlier model driven paradigms failed, and shares insights from commercial tool development experiences. Then, it shows how models based on XML are being used to automate large parts of the software development life cycle.

Greenfield, Jack. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>Metadata

Release of Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX) Standards Version 1.0

From a business perspective, SDMX offers governmental and other organizations a standard for modelling and exchanging aggregated statistical data which is not domain-specific, and which supports the use of existing metadata vocabularies for statistical concepts. Formats are primarily designed around time-series views of data, but cross-sectional views are also supported. Several large-scale implementations are already planned.

Gregory, Arofan. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Statistics>XML

Automate Your Publishing

Discusses the strategic importance of XML, illustrating it with an application they built to address the growing needs of the DaimlerChrysler MOPAR division. Mr. Haslam will share with you the challenges they faced and how they were solved as well as provide the metrics being used to validate the project's success.

Haslam, David. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Workflow>XML

Designing XML Formats: Versioning vs. Extensibilty

Designers of XML formats have to face the problem of how to design their formats to be extensible and yet be resilient to changes due revisions of the format. This presentation covers various techniques and considerations for versioning XML formats.

Obasanjo, Dare. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

Securing XML - Case Studies from the Financial Services Industry

XML is becoming the de facto business document interchange language for the Internet. Technologies such as SOAP and EBXML have been developed within the XML framework. Digital security standards and techniques are now being applied to XML, and to 'business webs' built using XML and Web Services. This presentation discusses these initiatives and the issues being encountered when applying security principles of confidentiality and non-repudiation to XML. Drawing on practical experience in Vordel projects, this presentation looks at how Web Services can be applied in the Financial Services industry to provide for improved secure partner and customer integration for the delivery of products and services.

O'Neill, Mark. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Security>XML

The Tao of Topic Maps: Seamless Knowledge in Practice

Topic Maps have figured very prominently at all recent IDEAlliance conferences, with a large number of interesting presentations on various aspects of the Topic Maps paradigm. However, at every conference there are always many people who are encountering Topic Maps for the first time. For those people, experiencing that something they have never heard of before - or don't quite get - is the "buzz of the conference" can be very frustrating. This presentation is designed to cater to the needs of such people by providing an introduction to the basic concepts of topic maps in a lively and informal manner.

Pepper, Steve. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Sitemaps>XML

Computing for the Mathematical Sciences with XML, Web Services, and P2P

While computing the Mathematical Sciences is similar to other scientific areas, often the researcher lacks the resources to carry out those computations. Grid computing and web services provide some possibilities for solutions but they do not address the increasing demand for computing resources and ad hoc computation networks. This paper describes a solution to this that uses peer-to-peer technologies to build ad hoc networks of computational agents that all speak XML to carry out computations.

Milowski, R. Alexander. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Scientific Communication>XML

Syntext Serna and New Trends in XML Content Authoring

Recent trends in XML content authoring demonstrate increasing shift towards advanced reuse patterns and multi-source compound document architectures. This imposes completely new requirements for the XML authoring tools, most of which were originally developed for narrative document authoring and architectures like Docbook or TEI. The key requirement is the ability to provide a single, transparent, directly editable view for such complex documents.

Antonov, Paul. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Technical Writing>XML

Bulletproofing Web Services

As companies and consumers rely more on Web services, it becomes increasingly important for Web services developers to know how to properly design, develop, deploy, and ultimately manage a Web services system. However, because of the inherent complexities that can arise with a Web service implementation, it can be difficult to grasp practical fundamentals and devise a step-by-step plan for Web services development.

Ariola, Wayne. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

Using SVG in Document Management

By taking advantage of open source products, and by stretching the definition of location, we were able to program xml and SVG tools to perform many of the functions of a standard geographic information system (GIS). Additionally, we were able to develop prototypes of document management, content management and knowledge visualization tools that are not easily available through standard GIS tools.

Hammond, Richard and Kiran Batchu. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>SVG

XSL Transform Self-Documentation

The XSL stylesheets used at PubMed Central for data conversion present a particular challenge because documentation is needed not only for the reference of developers, but also for digital archivists to ensure that the conversion process conforms to accepted archiving standards. The choices that developers make in writing conversion filters need to be transparent and reviewable. To meet this need, we defined a format for inserting documentation into XSL stylesheets. The documentation had to be easy to maintain and needed to be capable of generating documentation for developers, archivists, and other stakeholders.

Tao, Sandy, Jeff Beck and Demian Hess. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL