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

Managing Digital and Print Deliverables for Aviation Data

This paper discusses the rationale and design behind Jeppesen’s single-source publishing system. With the business needs to single-source publishing capabilities becoming more acute, Jeppesen partnered with Astoria Software to develop a solution. The result is a system based on commercial-off-the-shelf software, XML industry standards, and open-source tools.

Jones, Matthew and Bob Thomas. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Document Design>Single Sourcing>XML

How XML is Enabling the Next Generation of E-Learning Systems at Cisco

Cisco relies on Elearning for much of its training. So much so, that Cisco has become one of the largest Elearning providers in the world. In fact, Cisco provides over 120 courses in 152 different countries around the world. The courses and related assessments are often subject to frequent change, and the content must be produced in multiple languages or formats, combined into different courses, or efficiently searched and retrieved from large volumes of similar material. Early on, they realized that in order to keep that content current and manageable it was important to build an architecture that scaled well and was easy to maintain.XML became a clear choice for the data format. Cisco’s RLO (Reusable Learning Object) data model provides for flexible data modules that can be reused in many different contexts and driven to many different formats.

Syiek, Allan, Jay Todtenbier and Jay Di Silvestri. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Education>Online>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

XML and its Emerging Uses Within the Enterprise

In 2000, as one of the first speakers at XML One, Rod discussed the merging of the web, XML, and messaging into the loosely coupled applications that today we call web services. Rod's Emerging Internet Technology team has continued to explore new uses for XML beyond SOA for enterprises. His talk will cover how XML is a cornerstone for new types of web applications - Do It yourself applications - which include applications through dynamic scripting languages and the intersection with other emerging areas such as Rich Interactive Applications.

Smith, Rod. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Content Management>XML>Workplace

XML for Creative Content and Page Layout Applications

While technical documentation has traditionally been the domain for structured authoring, there is increasing interest in using XML for more “creative” materials such as sales brochures and marketing collateral. Such pre-sales materials often have even more compelling opportunities for single-sourcing and reuse than technical documents. Up to now, these materials have been produced one at a time in page-oriented publishing systems like Adobe InDesign and Quark. While this provides maximum flexibility in controlling exact page layouts, it can create a nightmare when small changes must be replicated across all the independent pages and documents. Why can’t we use XML to more flexibly handle this kind of content? In fact, we can! Using page formats from real marketing content, this whitepaper demonstrates how XML tools can be used to maintain highly graphical sales collateral, web pages, and product catalogs from a single source of XML information.

Severson, Eric. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Document Design>Marketing>XML

Semantic Thumbnails - Summarizing XML Documents and Collections

The concept of thumbnails is common in image representation. A thumbnail is a highly compressed version of an image that provides a small, yet complete visual representation to the human eye. We propose the adaptation of the concept of thumbnails to the domain of documents, whereby a thumbnail of any document can be generated from its semantic content, providing an adequate amount of information about the documents. However, unlike image thumbnails, document thumbnails are mainly for the consumption of software such as search engines, and other content processing systems. With the advent of the semantic web, the requirement for machine processing of documents has become extremely important. We give particular attention to electronic documents in XML and in RDF/XML, with a view towards the processing of documents in the semantic web.

Dalkilic, Mehmet and Arijit Sengupta. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Content Management>Metadata>Semantic

How XML is Shrinking The World Through Globalization

With XML, the flow of information and documents around the world has never been greater - with its robust and flexible format that enables sharing of data stored in multiple formats. As a result, XML is shrinking the global marketplace and opening doors to new markets that had previously been hindered by compatibility issues. The last and arguably most important mile in reaching new markets, however, is often in localizing or tailoring communications to fit the particular audience, whether by translating languages to ensuring sensitivity to local nuances and culture.

Seawick, Bill. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Content Management>Globalization>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

The Foundation for Occasionally Connected Computing

This paper motivates the need for a lightweight, standards-based web services implementation that runs on mass market mobile devices. It describes the advantages of using web services and the challenges which must be overcome to use web services on mass market devices with limited computing power and network bandwidth. The paper concludes by describing a new approach to web services which drastically reduces the code required to exchange data with remote services, enabling the creation of more compelling applications with sophisticated user interfaces and application logic.

Rollman, Rich and John Schneider. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Web Design>Wireless Web>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

Technical Writing and XML: Reconciling Editorial License with Structured Markup

In writing reference material, consistency of organization and presentation is key. If the same information is presented in a consistent order and style throughout the publication or information set, it enhances the readability and usability of the material for the consumer. Ease of use is vital. XML provides a means to assist in the standardization of reference material from both an organizational and a semantic/content-oriented standpoint. Standardization based on structure and content enhances the potential for reuse of the XML-tagged information for both print and electronic delivery.But while there can be a strong relationship between the authoring and editing of content and structured markup, all too often conflicts arise between technical writers and DTD/schema designers and programmers. The perceived need for editorial license and creative freedom by many authors/editors clashes with the need for rigid structure to facilitate ease of programming for markup technologists and programmers. The disagreements are commonly between format and structure, looseness and rigidity, and are often more philosophical than practical.

Rudder, Douglas. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>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

DOM, SAX and Standards - Where Now?

It's been 7 years and three "levels" since the first W3C DOM activity. XML and the way it is used has changed vastly over that time. DOM itself has moved from an API to access and manipulate an in-memory tree with no concept of namespaces, to an end to end XML technology, where parsing, modification of the tree (with the ability to check for validity with a schema as you go) and serialization are all specified.

Reakes, Gareth, Alberto Massari, Lucian Holland and Neil Graham. IDEAlliance. Articles>Web Design>Standards>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

Critique: Collaborative Reviewing of XML Documents

Critique is the first example of a new approach to contextual collaboration: Documentspaces. Documentspaces are places within a document in which teams can meet and work, synchronously or asynchronously, to create, review, and publish content.

Prescod, Paul. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Collaboration>Standards>XML

Towards Seamless Knowledge: Integrating Public Sector Portals

The more connected our computer systems become, the more we realise how *disconnected* our information really is. Disconnectedness is not new; it is simply far more apparent nowadays: so much so that it underpins a renewed quest for ways to integrate information - and knowledge. One aspect of this is the focus on information integration within large organizations. Another is the spread of portals whose task is not so much to provide information directly as to provide consolidated, indirect access to information that resides elsewhere. In the public sector, in particular, portals have sprung up like mushrooms over the last 3-4 years.

Pepper, Steve. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Web Design>Government>Semantic