Records, Tags and Pipelines

Serving XML is a markup language for expressing XML pipelines, and an extendible Java framework for defining the elements of the language. It provides a markup language for expressing flat-XML, XML-flat, flat-flat, and XML-XML transformations in pipelines. This article provides a brief introduction to the vocabulary of this language, and some examples of its flat-XML capabilities.

Parker, Daniel. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>Workflow

Microsoft Office Open XML Formats

This session will provide a technical description of the new Microsoft Office Open XML formats that will become the default XML based formats of the coming version of Microsoft Office (Office 12). The Microsoft Office XML formats provides a great Open and standard-based XML format for Office Documents that enables new XML document scenarios that were not possible before.

Paoli, Jean and Brian Jones. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Word Processing>Information Design>XML

Peaceful Coexistence: The SGML/XML Transition at Cessna Aircraft

The transition in a markup-based publishing environment from SGML- to XML-based tools and procedures can sometimes be complex. This session details Cessna Aircraft Company's implementation as it moves from an SGML environment to an XML enviroment.

Hahn, Michael. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Case Studies

Building Dynamic Applications With Mozilla, REX and XQuery.

The Mozilla platform offers a rich support of XML techniques, from low level ones (XPath, RDF, DOM, e4x) to rendering dialects like XHTML, SVG, XUL and XForms, thus making this platform a natural choice for the XML inclined. It is becoming a platform of choice when developing rich connected applications. When building dynamic applications, the developer is often facing a common set of programming patterns : gathering data from various remote and local sources, storing data with an optional transformation phase, and updating parts of the GUI to reflect the modifications in the data store. With today's ubiquitous use of XML as a data exchange syntax, a major part of these tasks can be achieved with XML based solutions. In this article we will present an XML centric solution that aims at minimizing the impedance mismatch between different data models that plagues classical architectures involving for instance XML/object/relationnal translation. It combines some of Mozilla's existing capabilities with REX (Remote Events for XML) and a native XML database with XQuery support. REX provides means to update the XUL based GUI and the database, while the XML database is used as a versatile storage engine.

Desré, Fabrice. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

XQueryP: An XML Application Development Language

XQuery is a language that operates on XML in its native data model, using the type system of XML Schema. By the time of the XML 2006 conference, XQuery Version 1.0 will probably be adopted as a W3C Recommendation. Like SQL, XQuery is declarative and functional, which makes it well-suited for automatic optimization. XQuery Version 1.0 is designed for querying and transforming XML data, and W3C has published a working draft of an XQuery extension for updating XML data. With an additional small extension, XQuery could be turned into a native application development language for XML, eliminating the impedance mismatch problem. An earlier paper briefly outlined such an extension, called XQueryP. This paper expands on the XQueryP proposal, adding more details, additional features such as error handling, and some use cases that illustrate the use of the extended language in various different environments.

Kossmann, Donald. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XSL>XML

A Study of the Adoption and Usage of XML Schema - Its Design and Results

There is an obvious need to understand the current adoption and the current usage of XML Schema by the IT industry. That is, XML standardization bodies, XML tool providers, and IT decision makers need to know about the current position of XML Schema on the 'adoption curve'; they would like to know who is using XML Schema, what it is used for, and how users reflect on their usage. All sorts of more detailed questions arise: Is XML Schema usage observably increasing? Who is authoring schemas? (Developers? DBA's? Analysts? Who else?) Who is consuming schemas? What tools are used to author and consume schemas? What other meta-data languages are used in the same corporation? The study at hand covered these and some more questions. The goal was to gather broad information on XML Schema adoption and usage, leaving room for studies that dive into more detailed subtopics. There were 2,000 solicited participants of the study with 59 completed responses. The presentation (paper) does not just present the results of the study, but also motivates the study, describes its design, and draws some conclusions. This study has been carried out in collaboration with the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

Kitsis, Stan. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML

XML Project Management Best Practices

Three panellists talk about the challenges of managing an XML publishing and documentation project. After brief introductory remarks from each speaker, there will be a general discussion with the audience about the challenges of XML project management in the publishing world.

Hamilton, Kate, Sarah S. O'Keefe and Mike Sherlock. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Project Management>Information Design>XML

Daddy? Where Do Schemas Come From? Some Facts of Life for Schema Users

The rules for finding schema components when validating a document using W3C's XML Schema 1.0 are widely misunderstood. This presentation will the rules for constructing a schema and describe the reasoning behind the design.

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Standards

Word and OpenOffice for XML Authoring

In this session, three panellists and audience members will discuss creating XML documents using two familiar word processors: Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. Paul Bernard will introduce some real-world examples of how publishers are using Microsoft Word in XML workflows, and how Office 2007 and OpenXML will affect those processes. Jon Parsons will discuss XML, Office 2007, and content management for document integration in the middle tier. Lisa Richards will discuss XML authoring in OpenOffice.

Hatter, Clyde, Mark Jacobson and Jon Parsons. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Word Processing>Information Design>XML

Resistance is Futile: You Will Store XML

Industry standards consortia have defined thousands of exchange formats for business related messages in XML Increasingly, data conforming to industry exchange formats are being stored in files and database systems as XML (as well being mapped to relational data). This talk describes what happens when the exchange formats and the storage formats become one. Business applications can be built in new ways that can reduce development costs and more readily accommodate evolving business requirements. The use of generic tools rather than bespoke software becomes more attractive. The criteria for managing XML schemas and for XML schema evolution change. The talk will outline trends arising from the unification of storage formats and exchange formats. It will incorporate a case study to illustrate the main points.

Malaika, Susan. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Case Studies

XML Pipeline Processing

Pipeline processing is a powerful programming technique that can lead to programs that are easier to maintain and enhance and monolithic imperative programs. Developers familiar with the power of pipeline operations central to the UNIX operating system know how simple, modular tools can be chained together to accomplish a wide variety of complex tasks. XSLT pipelines offer the same advantage for XML transformation. Where UNIX pipelines are based around standard input and output of lines of text, XSLT pipelines rely on the structure of well-formed XML between stages. The panel members will demonstrate the value of a pipeline processing approach and discuss implementation specifics.

Page, Sam and Norman Walsh. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Workflow

Agile XML Development

Three panellists talk about how they've applied agile development techniques to XML, followed by audience discussion and Q&A: Tony Coates will discuss XML and schema quality assurance using unit test frameworks. David Carver will discuss agile XML schema development. Claudia Lucia Jimenez-Guarin will discuss software construction for evolving systems with incomplete data definition.

Carver, David, Anthony Coates and Claudia Lucía Jimenez-Guarin. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Agile

Unleashing the Power of XML

The "Unleashing the power of XML" presentation provides insight, from 20 years personal experience in the publishing industry, on the value of good markup and the challenges of migrating from SGML to XML based systems. We will review the results of an informal survey of the publishing industry that focuses on how XML is (and is not) being leveraged and the rationale behind these decisions. Finally, we will discuss a 'new' technology that has the potential to revolutionize the publishing industry as well as highlight some real world applications already leveraging this technology.

McBeath, Darin. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Case Studies

Lessons Learned: Development from Initial Planning to Successful Implementation

From initial data modeling, to technical XML Schema design and critical programmatic realization, we have an actionable, real-world set of comprehensive recommendations that can help you formulate a successful XML implementation.

Utzinger, Melissa and Cheryl Connors. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Standards

Lovely DITA, Meta Maid, Ready-made Metadata

Since adaptation and reuse are core ideas of DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), perhaps we'll be forgiven if we adapt and reuse old Beatles standards to explain the newest XML standards (hey, maybe it's the only way to make XML sound catchy). DITA is an IBM gift to the technical documentation community that was approved as a standard this spring by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the hosts for many XML interchange standards such as ebXML. Ever since, tech writers have been buzzing about an easier way to get into structured topic-based writing with DITA XML and asking XML Editor vendors to add support for DITA.

Doyle, Bob. EContent (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

XML Design for Relational Storage  

Design principles for XML schemas that eliminate redundancies and avoid update anomalies have been studied recently. Several normal forms, generalizing those for relational databases, have been proposed. All of them, however, are based on the assumption of a native XML storage, while in practice most of XML data is stored in relational databases. In this paper we study XML design and normalization for relational storage of XML documents. To be able to relate and compare XML and relational designs, we use an information-theoretic framework that measures information content in relations and documents, with higher values corresponding to lower levels of redundancy. We show that most common relational storage schemes preserve the notion of being well-designed (i.e., anomalies- and redundancy-free). Thus, existing XML normal forms guarantee well-designed relational storages as well. We further show that if this perfect option is not achievable, then a slight restriction on XML constraints guarantees a “second-best” relational design, according to possible values of the information-theoretic measure. We finally consider an edge-based relational representation of XML documents, and show that while it has similar information-theoretic properties with other relational representations, it can behave significantly worse in terms of enforcing integrity constraints.

Kolahi, Solmaz and Leonid Libkin. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>Databases

XML-Based XML Schema Access  

XML Schema’s abstract data model consists of components, which are the structures that eventually define a schema as a whole. XML Schema’s XML syntax, on the other hand, is not a direct representation of the schema components, and it proves to be surprisingly hard to derive a schema’s components from the XML syntax. The Schema Component XML Syntax (SCX) is a representation which attempts to map schema components as faithfully as possible to XML structures. SCX serves as the starting point for applications which need access to schema components and want to do so using standardized and widely available XML technologies.

Wilde, Erik and Felix Michel. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML

XML-Based Multimodal Interaction Framework for Contact Center Applications  

In this paper, we consider a way to represent contact center applications as a set of multiple XML documents written in different markups including VoiceXML and CCXML. Applications can comprise a dialog with IVR, call routing and agent scripting functionalities. We also consider ways how such applications can be executed in run-time contact center environment.

Anisimov, Nikolay, Brian Galvin and Herbert Ristock. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Information Design>XML

All About Output from DITA Maps

Using Adobe FrameMaker 9, one can save a DITA Map in various formats depending on one’s requirements. It could be intermediary output, like – FrameMaker Book/Document; or it can be final output, like – Print/PDF.

Adobe (2009). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Introducing WinANT

I decided to simplify the DITA publishing process for myself by building a Windows interface to Ant. Ant was developed to allow programmers to write a simple build file in an XML format, and then process that XML file with the Ant build software.

Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2007). Articles>Information Design>Software>XML

Structure View Enhancement in FrameMaker 9

The Structure View allows for real-time validation of the structured element content while editing. It discourages the author from violating the constraint rules set by the EDD or XML schema which was earlier possible only while saving or exporting the document. The Structure View is now capable of pointing the constraint error for integer and float data constraints. The content will turn Red indicating that the content does not satisfy the data type constraint.

Adobe (2009). Articles>Information Design>XML>Adobe FrameMaker

How to Customize the DITA Open Toolkit PDF Plugin Output to Remove "on page xx" Text for Cross References

This tutorial uses the DITA Open Toolkit 1.4.2.1 and the corresponding PDF plugin release, and Wrycan's demo text. This assumes you have a working DITA environment and can run the default formatting with PDF plugin.

Blogspot (2009). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Endless Possibilities: Norm Walsh on the Changing Nature of Publishing

Why XML documents aren’t a good fit for relational databases, how university professors are creating custom text books for students, and find links to several innovative projects that are demonstrating the power of XML and its cousin XQuery.

Walsh, Norman and Scott Abel. Content Wrangler, The (2009). Articles>Interviews>Information Design>XML

Linking and Relationship Tables  

Inline links and citations can be disruptive to the flow of information. Try to delete them because a topic is a discrete unit of information that is meaningful when it is displayed alone.

Henry, Carolyn. Silicon Valley DITA User's Group (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA