Freestyle Markup Language

This paper provides a new generation of a markup language by introducing the Freestyle Markup Language (FML). Demands placed on the language are elaborated, considering current standards and discussions. Conception, a grammatical definition, a corresponding object graph and the bi-directional unambiguous transformation between these two congruent representation forms are set up. The result of this paper is a fundamental definition of a completely new markup language, consolidating many deficiency-discourses and experiences into one particular implementation concept, encouraging the evolution of markup.

Where XForms Meets the Glass

We have observed two prevalent design paradigms for web applications: those who start from an existing data or process definition and project from that outward toward the user, and those conversely who start from a sense of desired user experience and derive from that required data and process elements. Design methods which seem natural to one community may look overly abstract, layered with unnecessary separation of concerns, and academic to no purpose. Conversely, others may be frustrated by a seeming lack of concern for reuse, valid content, and support for multiple design roles all of which may argue for additional architectural layers. Due to affinity of current web presentation technology to JSON encoded data, many times the choice to start with user experience precludes re-use of existing XML data. We present an approach to bridging this methodology and data divide by working within the conventions of existing web application frameworks to introduce incremental separation of concerns such as Model-View layering with interfaces and behavior suited to the introduction of XML-based technologies such as XForms at the model layer. In this way we hope to provide incremental means to adopt first a separation of concerns that supports packaging and reuse of model data and behavior, and secondly an XML-based technology for such data models that supports convenient projection of existing business data and process definitions to the client for user interaction.

Java Integration of XQuery - an Information-Unit Oriented Approach

An infrastructure for integrating XQuery into Java systems is described. The infrastructure comprises a new API (XQJPLUS, built on the standard API XQJ) and a tool for Java code generation. The basic idea of the approach is to deliver query results not in terms of query result items, but in terms of “information units”, ready-to-use entities assembled from the result items. The assembly process is guided by control information embedded into the query result, so that the query controls exactly what will be delivered, and in which form. Information units can represent information in a great variety of forms, including many map types and custom objects. The information units produced by a query are collected into a special container ("info tray") which offers name-based, intuitive access to the units. The query-specific structure of an info tray may be formally defined by a tray schema from which an "info shape" can be generated, a Java class representing a specific kind of info tray and offering compiler checked data access. Info trays also support data integration, as their possibly very heterogeneous contents can be addressed in a uniform way, using path-like expressions.

Processing Arbitrarily Large XML using a Persistent DOM

As the adoption of XML reaches more and more application domains, data sizes increase, and efficient XML handling gets more and more important. Many applications face scalability problems due to the overhead of XML parsing, the difficulty of effectively finding particular XML nodes, or the sheer size of XML documents, which nowadays can easily exceed gigabytes of data. In particular the latter issue can make certain tasks seemingly impossible to handle, as many applications depend on parsing XML documents completely into a Document Object Model (DOM) memory structure. Parsing XML into a DOM typically requires close to or even more memory as the serialized XML would consume, thus making it prohibitively expensive to handle XML documents in the gigabyte range. Recent research and development suggests that it is possible to modify these applications to run a wide range of tasks in a streaming fashion, thus limiting the memory consumption of individual applications. However this requires not only changes in the underlying tools, but often also in user code, such as XSLT style sheets. These required changes can often be unintuitive and complicate user code. A different approach is to run applications against an efficient, persistent, hard-disk backed DOM implementation that does not require entire documents to be in memory at a time. This talk will discuss such a DOM implementation, EMC's xDB, showing how to use binary XML and efficient backend structures to provide a standards compliant, non-memory-backed, transactional DOM implementation, with little overhead compared to regular memory-based DOMs. It will also give performance comparisons and show how to run existing applications transparently against xDB's DOM implementation, using XSLT stylesheets as an example.

The EXPath Packaging System

This paper introduces the EXPath Packaging System. It describes the problems addressed by application and library packaging, and the current lack of existing solutions for XML technologies, before describing the Packaging System itself, its structure, its usages and its implementations. It introduces briefly other systems built (or that could be built) on top of this system, like a packaging for web applications written using only XML technologies, an online repository of libraries and applications, or standard structures for XML projects.

Reverse Modeling for Domain-Driven Engineering of Publishing Technology

We report in this paper on a technique that we call reverse modeling. Reverse modeling starts with a conceptual model that is formulated in one or more generic modeling technologies such as UML or XML Schema. It abstracts from that model a custom, domain-specific meta-model and re-formulates the original model as an instance of the new meta-model. We demonstrate the value of reverse modeling with two case studies: One domain-specific meta-model facilitates design and user interface of a so-called instance generator for broadcasting productions metadata. Another one structures the translation of XML-encoded printer data for invoices into semantic XML. In a further section of this paper, we take a more general view and survey patterns that have evolved in the conceptual modeling of documents and data and that implicitly suggest sound meta-modeling constructs. Taken together, the two case studies and the survey of patterns in conceptual models bring us one step closer to our superior goal of developing a meta-meta-modeling facility whose instances are custom meta-models for conceptual document and data models. The research that is presented in this paper brings forward a core set of elementary constructors that a meta-meta-modeling facility should provide.

Scripting Documents with XQuery: Virtual Documents in TNTBase

This paper introduces the concept of Virtual Documents and its prototypical realization in our TNTBase system, a versioned XML database. Virtual Documents integrate XQuery-based computational facilities into documents like JSP/PHP do for relational queries. We view the integration of computation in documents as an enabling technology and evaluate it on a handful of real-world use cases.

Discourse situations and markup interoperability

Interoperability is often considered a key issue for information systems, but there are many different kinds of interoperability and only a few have been give precise definitions. Situation semantics and the notions of discourse situations and resource situations are promising tools for the conceptualization of markup within a general theory of communication. This paper uses these concepts to explore the role of context in determining the meaning of markup and to define a particular kind of interoperability for markup structures. A Dublin Core OAI-PMH record and associated schema are used to show how the use of contextual information supports (or fails to support) the interoperability of the record.

XML Essence Testing

SYNOPSIS: PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Institutes of Health free digital archive, gathering together biomedical and life sciences journal literature from diverse sources. When an article arrives at PMC, it conforms to one of over 40 evolving DTDs. An ingestion process applies appropriate "Modified Local" and "Production" XSLT style sheets to produce two instances of the common NLM Archiving and Interchange DTD. In the "Essence Testing" phase, the essential nodes of these XML instances, as specified by some 60 XPath expressions, are compared. This method allows the reliable detection of unintentional changes to an XSLT style sheet that can have negative impacts on product quality. OBJECTIVE: Create an easy-to-use tool that allows tracking, reporting, and qualitative analysis to monitor the effects of changes to existing XSLT style sheets on the content of XML articles. The tool should have the ability to look beyond differences in the XML structures of those articles, focusing on essential data and its semantics (the document’s Essence). RESULTS: A Guided User Interface was created using CGI, which invokes 2 PERL scripts (sampler [SQL, UNIX], and converter [Saxon 9.1.0.5J]). A test and a control NXML document are created. The Essence is extracted from those documents using XPath expressions, and a JAVA program compares and formulates a report of the differences in the Essence documents. SIGNIFICANCE: Quality control reports on XSLT style sheets are now run on a weekly basis, or any time significant changes are made to the XSLT style sheets. The level of control and the granularity of tracking has increased, and has had a very positive effect on quality of the XML output.

Managing semantics in XML vocabularies: an experience in the legal and legislative domain

Akoma Ntoso is an XML vocabulary for legal and legislative documents sponsored by the United Nations, initially for African Countries and subsequently for use in other world countries. The XML documents that represent legal and legislative resources in Akoma Ntoso contain a large quantity of elements and sections with concrete semantic information about the correct description and identification of the resource itself and the legal knowledge it contains. Such information is organized in many distinct conceptual layers, allowing for the contribution of different semantic information according to competencies and role in the workflow of the contributor. This paper shows how the Akoma Ntoso standard expresses the independent conceptual layers of semantic information, and provides ontological structures on top of them. We also discuss how current Semantic Web technologies could be used on these layers to reason on the underlying legal texts. As one of the main funding principles of Akoma Ntoso is the long-term preservation of legal documents and of their intended meaning, this paper also shows and justifies some design decisions that have been made in order allow future toolmakers to access the enclosed legal information without having to rely on current technology that may be long forgotten in the future decades.