The Kiln XML Publishing Framework

Kiln, previously known as xMod, is an open source multi-platform framework for building and deploying complex websites whose source content is primarily in TEI/XML. It brings together various independent software components into an integrated whole that provides the infrastructure and base functionality for such sites. Separation of roles is central to Kiln's design, allowing people with different backgrounds, knowledge and skills to work simultaneously on the same project without interfering with one another’s work. Developed and maintained at King’s College London it has been used to generate more than 50 websites for digital humanities research projects which have very different source materials and customised functionality.

Semantic Profiling Using Indirection

Profiling is an often-used XML publishing technique where nodes are marked as conditional according to a set of profiles, identified using attribute values as filtering conditions. When publishing, the nodes are only included if the publishing conditions match the publishing context. The profiles are sometimes also used as variables in text content, including the attribute value in the publication. While useful, these techniques have a number of problems. For example, if the attribute values need to be changed, the new values usually require converting any “live” legacy documentation to the new values, changing the schema, stylesheets, etc, and supporting both the old and new profiles will not be possible. This paper takes a look at profiling, some of the common problems and suggest ways to solve those problems. An abstraction layer solves this. The profile values are not used directly; instead they represent a specific “semantic profile”. The abstraction layer can be expressed using URNs that are matched to human-readable values when required. A different problem arises when handling XML documents with structures not in our control. The document might be from a third party and not be editable directly, or use incompatible profiling semantics. These documents can be profiled using out-of-line profiling, describing the conditions outside the document, for example, in an extended XLink linkbase listing the nodes and their profiles. XLink, as it turns out, is well suited for this.

An Onion of Documents and Metadata

When a product cannot be tested as a finished unit, its warranty, as it were, depends on extensive testing of its component parts and assemblies. The record for products of the Y-12 National Security Complex has for many years been in the form of lengthy paper documents. Recently we have begun a process to capture some of this information in XML documents. However, this is not simply another XML publishing project. Because our products have a potentially very long shelf life and we cannot foresee the computing environment in their distant future existence, we must take extraordinary measures to document not only the products themselves but also the environment in which the documentation has been prepared. Adding complexity to this documentation challenge is a parallel effort to capture the output data of test equipment and wrap it in XML. While this project is very much a work in progress, we can see that one major component of its possible success will be the coordination of complex metadata.