XML Overview

This presentation is a 90 minute session. It will cover many areas of XML and XML technologies. It has been constructed to provide the audience a broad understanding of XML and XML technologies in a short amount of time. The presentation is geared to ensure that new XML users can obtain the maximum benefit from other sessions presented at XML 2004. The attendees will gain an understanding of XML jargon and acronyms used in XML technologies, as well.

Harvey, Betty. IDEAlliance (2004). Presentations>Information Design>Standards>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

XML Marks the Spot: XML Helps Move Knowledge from Books to Bytes

The discussion will share advancements in the areas of digital capture, storage, management, access and output. It will review the significant benefits and cultural implications with the digitization of information, focusing on software and storage solutions creating easy access and search capability for scanned information. A demonstration and review of the automatic bookscanning process relating to the use of XML will share how modifications can be made to a pre-existing XML file.

Belkhir, Lofti. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>eBooks>XML

Enterprise-Level Web Form Applications with XForms and XFDL

This paper describes a platform for the XML definition of secure, intelligent web-based applications. XForms provides a powerful model-view-controller (MVC) pattern that may best be described as a cause-and-effect XML processing model originated by XFDL. This paper describes a new version of XFDL that consumes, or skins, XForms. Hence, this paper presents the first integration of the standardized XML markup for expressing the core processing of a web-based form applications (XForms) with a host language (XFDL) that offers security, precision presentation, a document-centric capability, and other features that contribute to a more rich user experience.

Boyer, John. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Forms>XML

Getting the Most Out of COCOON: A XML-Based Webs Service for a Registration Agency

Since 2005 the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) is established as a DOI registration agency for scientific content. Data providers transmit XML-files containing the DC-based metadata descriptions of the scientific data to a webservice infrastructure at the TIB, which was created by the Research center L3S during a project founded by the registration agency for scientific content. Data providers transmit XML-files containing the DC-based metadata descriptions of the scientific data to a webservice infrastructure at the TIB, which was created by the Research center L3S during a project founded by the German research association (DFG). This webservice infrastructure is based on the web application framework COCOON. We have however extended COCOON with full webservice functionalities. Using XSLT the webservice is furthermore able to transform XML-metadata files into well-formed PICA-files to insert the metadata information into the library catalogue of the TIB.

Brase, Jan. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

On Language Creation

During the past twenty years, a huge number of custom languages - at least hundreds, perhaps a couple of thousand - have been attempted. Almost all have been miserable failures. That is to say, the vast majority have failed to achieve wide adoption, and those that were adopted have often failed to achieve their goals, whether of reducing costs, enriching applications, or both.

Bray, Tim. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>Standards

New XML Validation Technologies in Action

This paper is based from a number of real-world XML validation projects, and compares and contrasts the experience 'in the trenches' with the current state of the art in XML validation standards. Validation is a topic of some controversy in the XML community. While there has been movement from the basic validation offered by XML 1.0 DTD's, there is little consensus on whether that movement has been in the right direction.

Brown, Alex. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Programming>XML

Large Scale Validation of Millions of UBL Invoices with XML Schema and Schematron

Since February 1st 2005, millions of invoices have been exchanged between the private sector and the public sector in Denmark. This paper focuses on real life problems, experiences and solutions with syntactical and semantical validation of millions of electronic invoices. Localization and documentation for regional and national use is a massive and important assignment. I.e. decisions on the use of identifiers have to be specified and local payment methods must be mapped to the international standard. The result is a message with many internal integrity constraints that cannot be validated with the UBL schemas alone. In order to provide even stronger validation, non-normative supplementary schemas have been developed. These schemas perform stronger validation based on decisions about the use of national identifiers for companies and persons. In addition to the use of XML schema – Schematron is used for the validation of internal referential integrity constraints. Experiences and theoretical considerations on the localization of international vocabularies are discussed.

Brun, Mikkel Hippe, Brian Nielsen, Christian Lanng and Bryan Rasmussen. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication>XML

XML Document Formats

As world events and business opportunities collide, the requirements for interoperable document formats become increasingly evident. Mandating XML for systems is a first step, but real information can't be shared effectively without a common understanding on the semantics and usage of the markup. One solution is to use agreed-on custom schemas. Another is to cite well-standardized formats such as XHTML, or deploy more specific XML formats such as Microsoft Office XML or the OpenDocument Format. None of these latter formats were written with a particular semantic usage in mind. They are of more general applicability than custom-built schemas, can be used for human-readable documents, and can be built into specific tools.

Bullard, C. Len. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

Binding the Graphical Web (Component and Data Bindings with XBL, XHTML and SVG)

The emerging XML based web increasingly relies upon ways of presenting content in a just in time manner. Presentation technologies such as SVG and XHTML can do so, yet the power to properly harness them will likely lie in the emergent binding languages such as XBL, sXBL, and XTF. In this presentation, bindings and binding languages will be explored, illustrating how such environments as the Mozilla Firefox 1.5 browser are using XBL as a means for performing component binding into XHTML, SVG and XForms interfaces, looks at sXBL and the W3C's XBL directions, and details why such binding languages likely represent the future of XML presentation and interaction.

Cagle, Kurt. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

Plugging into the Pervasive XML Infrastructure

In 1998 the industry got behind a common vision of interoperability for systems and data using XML. The web (HTTP/HTML) connected millions of users to each other as well by presenting information they needed - both at work and from home. The next logical step is to connect systems together and break down the stove pipes of information and business logic that exist to unleash an entirely new wave of productivity gains. In this talk I will trace the march of computing that has led to incredible productivity gains over several decades; draw parallels to the invention of electrical generation facilities and the subsequent building of the electric grid that provided power for all to harness and call out the challenges that still lie ahead of us.

Campbell, Dave and Soumitra Sengupta. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>History

Integrating Messaging and Databases to Implement Service Architectures

There has been much debate over two quite different approaches to implementing XML services. The "web services" approach leverages a rather large and not yet stabilized stack of formats and protocols built on top of SOAP that promise secure, reliable operations; the "REST" or "Plain old XML over HTTP" approach keeps the basic formats and operations quite simple, but puts the burden for any security or end-to-end reliability on the application developer rather than the computing infrastructure. This presentation considers a third approach which complements many of the ideas in both WS and REST but uses an XML-capable DBMS as the messaging hub or service broker. This makes it feasible to support asynchronous, loosely coupled communications between service requesters and providers.

Champion, Michael. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

XML Data Binding: Integrating XML and Object-Oriented Technologies

Data are the essence of business processes and technical applications, and managing data effectively is critical for success in any industry. To that end, XML has emerged as the dominant syntax for data management. The fundamental organizing principle of XML is hierarchy. Parent-child relationships among data are maintained to infinite depth through markup. Hierarchies also serve as a critical component of XML’s validation capability. An XML Schema document defines the rules for structuring data within an XML instance by describing a finite set of hierarchy sequences and an explicit set of sequences of elements within them. Hierarchy, therefore, is the underlying principle of data management in XML.

Chaudhuri, Neil. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML

XML in the Wild Blue Yonder

A recent survey of XML implementations found that many United States Air Force (USAF) communities are incorporating XML as a foundational step in their migration to a net-centric vision. Although the survey was limited to publicly available resources –and thus only a partial view of total USAF efforts – thoughtful analysis of the survey results nonetheless reveals both strengths and weaknesses in the approaches inspected. In this paper we summarize the survey results and what they imply for how the USAF is progressing towards net-centricity. We note potential positive impacts XML technologies could have on USAF business practices, and some potential shortfalls.

Malloy, Mary Ann, Cheryl Connors and Amit Maitra. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>Case Studies