XML best practices: panel discussion

Who doesn't want to do things well? Who doesn't want to stand on the shoulders of giants? Who doesn't want to share hard earned wisdom with others? So why is it that "best practices" are so elusive? In this panel discussion we consider how "best practices" (and practices that, for whatever reasons, masquerade as "best") can be discovered, recognized, verified, modified, replaced, debunked, enforced, promulgated, etc.

Visual Designers: Those XML tools with no angle bracket at all!

Is the future of XML planned to be without XML? Visual tools are everywhere and XProc might be the first XML dialect to be immediately available with its visual editor. After erratic evolutions, visual tools have become more and more precise (even HTML+CSS tools are now very powerful), and have become more and more main stream. Could we imagine dealing with XML Schema without decent Visual Tools? We will show in this presentation an overview of where we do XML without seeing any angle bracket and the places where we expect to have some equivalent tools soon.

A toolkit for multi-dimensional markup

In this paper we describe the extended standoff approach defined by XStandoff (the successor of the Sekimo Generic Format, SGF), together with the accompanied collection of XSLT stylesheets. SGF has undergone further developments after its first presentation (cf. Stührenberg and Goecke, 2008) which resulted into the new development version called XStandoff containing different changes addressed in this paper. In addition, refinements have been made to the already available transformation scripts that help generating SGF and XStandoff instances and newly developed stylesheets have been added for the deletion of single XStandoff annotations and the conversion into inline representations.

Formal and informal meaning from documents through skeleton sentences

In [Sperberg-McQueen et al. 2000a], Sperberg-McQueen et al. describe a framework in which the semantics of a structured document is represented by the set of inferences (statements) licensed by the document, that is, statements which can be considered to hold on the basis of the document. The authors suggest that an adequate set of basic inferences can be generated from the document itself by a fairly simple skeleton sentence and deictic expression mechanism. These ideas were taken up and developed in various ways and contexts in later work (see for example [Sperberg-McQueen et al. 2002]) and came to be called the “Formal tag-set description” approach (FTSD). The approach is independent of any particular logical system, and the possibility that the statements licensed by a document be in natural language has been mentioned and exemplified, though not to a large extent. With a different set of preoccupations in mind (namely, providing semantic support to an author during the document creation process), Marcoux introduced in [Marcoux 2006] intertextual semantics (IS), a framework in which the meaning of a document is entirely and exclusively represented by natural language segments. In this paper, we compare the IS and FTSD approaches, and argue that the insights into the meaning of a document supplied by the two approaches actually complement each other. We give a number of concrete examples of increasing complexity, including the set of formal and informal statements derivable in each case, to substantiate our claim.

Akara — Spicy bean fritters and an XML data services platform

Akara is an open-source XML/Web mashup platform supporting XML processing in an environment of RESTful data services. It includes “Web triggers”, which build on REST architecture to support orchestration of Web events. This is a powerful system for integrating services and components across the Web in a declarative way, so that perhaps a Web request could access information from a service running on Amazon EC2 to analyze information gathered from social networks, run through a remote spam detector service. Akara is designed from ground up to support such rich interactions, using the latest conventions and standards of the Web 2.0 era. It's also designed for performance, modern processor conventions and architectures, and for ready integration with other tools and components.

XML in the Browser: the Next Decade

At the 1999 XTech conference in San Jose, Netscape demonstrated their web browser natively rendering an XML document for the first time. It is now a decade later, browsers have changed, and there has possibly been forward progress. This paper briefly describes the demonstration from 1999 and then questions whether current browsers can or cannot handle what was demonstrated in 1999. It also details how new XML vocabularies can be integrated into the browser to provide a new way forward for XML in the browser.

Documenting and Implementing Guidelines with Schematron

Data exchange specifications must be broad and general in order to achieve acceptance, yet they must also be customizable in a controlled and interoperable manner in order to be useful. This paper describes an approach employing the Schematron language and literate programming ideas for developing the guidelines needed to effectively use data exchange specifications.

Agile Business Objects Management Application for Electronic Records Archive Transfer Process

In order to continue to fulfill its mission in the information technology age, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has made the decision to develop the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system. One of the goals is to provide to the archivists a modernized system with automatic workflow that can streamline the digital archive business process. For an archival system, Ingest is one of the core components. As part of the ingest process, this component would allow the record Producer to negotiate submission agreement before transferring digital materials into the system. Within the framework of a service-oriented architecture with business process management, the ERA system uses XML to represent business objects and metadata. In this paper, we will show how the synergetic combination of XForms and Genericode makes the system agile and responsive to business user requirements. Furthermore, the approach fits well with ERA's design principle to use international and industry standards, and facilitates the integration of XML business objects and the electronic records metadata. We believe that the standard-based approach of XForms+Genericode exposed in this paper can be generalized to develop any e-Forms system with a set of control values and vocabularies.

hData - A Simple XML Framework for Health Data Exchange

Health data interoperability issues limit the expected benefits of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. Ideally, the medical history of a patient is recorded in a set of digital continuity of care documents which are securely available to the patient and their care providers on demand. The history of electronic health data standards includes multiple standards organizations, differing goals, and ongoing efforts to reconcile the various specifications. Existing standards define a format that is too complex for exchanging health data effectively. We propose hData, a simple XML-based framework to describe health information. hData addresses the complexities of the current HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). hData is an XML design that can be completely validated by modern XML editors and is explicitly designed for extensibility to address future health information exchange needs. hData applies established best practices for XML document architectures to the health domain, thereby facilitating interoperability, increasing software developer productivity, and thus reducing the cost for creating and maintaining EHR technologies.

Graciously handling a level of change in a complex specification

The concept of a flexible and yet also breakable interface is central to successful configuration and version management for a messaging specification. Changes which are made to a message or message definition should not affect systems or design teams that are not concerned with the subject of the change. However, changes causing unexpected behaviour or misinterpretation of a message should ‘break the interface’ thus making it impossible for systems to unknowingly use a changed message in a way which may hold clinical safety or other risks. Achieving these features in a complex specification with a diverse implementation community is not a simple matter. However, there are several measures that could be beneficial. Applying the kind of configuration management discipline that is well known for complex software artefacts to the development of a complex specification is likely to be cost-effective, even though the tools available are less mature. A combined strategy of representing key aspects of design configuration not only within the specification artefacts published to the implementation community, but also as a matrix documenting expected impacts, and within message instances in live operation, is also promising as a way to enable gracious handling of change.