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

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