Extreme Markup Languages 2000

Friday, August 18, 2000

Click on highlighted titles for visual presentation.

Yellow Track

These days it is obvious that documents must be reused for different purposes, e.g. printed on paper or published on the web. Such reuse can be accomplished using a two step process where a source document is produced according to a Base DTD in the first step and various target DTDs are applied in the second step according to the required areas of use. A Base DTD, the FlexDTD, is presented which is characterized by a free structure, generic elements, embedded typographical markup, and great simplicity.

Blue Track

Managing web relationships with document structures
Michael Priestley, IBM Toronto Lab

Navigation and links can be made easier for an author to manage when they are collected into separate relationship documents or navigation maps, which use the same semantics for describing relationships as are used to structure content models in other documents in their domain. By reusing content structuring semantics for relationship management, the relationships captured in a relationship document can be accessed and manipulated through the document's document object model (DOM). By layering multiple relationship documents with different structuring paradigms, an author can create and manage a multidimensional web, without having to deal with issues of display or comprehension associated with handling that complexity in a single document. This presentation describes a prototype project that exercised these principles against a simple web.

9:45 - 10:30

Yellow Track
How to maintain a family of DTDs and keep them related using switchboards
(ppt. version located here)
Diederik A. Gerth van Wijk, Wolters Kluwer Nederland

While it is sometimes important to use a large number of DTDs in an organization, their management presents significant challenges. We have developed a technique by which content models can be loosened or tightened by using Marked Sections to control which portions of a DTD will take effect and setting the values of "INCLUDE" or "IGNORE" for the Marked Sections using parameter entities (called switches). All localization for a specific DTD is made in a switch file that overrules the default switch settings. A central switchboard controls the default settings based on the state of previously-defined switches. This on-the-fly creation makes it hard to ensure valid model groups, so the source DTDs are normalized into a single valid DTD with parameter entities resolved and empty content tokens removed from model groups.

Blue Track

Hypertext functionalities in XML
Fabio Vitali, University of Bologna

XMLC is a very general architecture to add sophisticated hypertext functionality to XML documents. The overall design goal is to create a complete authoring environment for sophisticated hypermedia based on the most recent protocols and languages available on the WWW. We hypothesize that XLink will be very useful for realizing the following sophisticated hypertext-related functionalities: editable browsers; storing document content and link anchors separately; external linkbases; and displaying link spans, node and link attributes. Further, we describe how they are being implemented in the current version of our XMLC browser. In fact, the architecture of XMLC can be fruitfully used for more than visualization, for it is an extremely general way to associate behaviors to XML elements, and thus to produce active documents that perform computations, enact goals, produce results.

11:00 - 11:45

Yellow Track

The relationship between general and specific DTDs: Criticizing TEI critical editions
David J. Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh

Any markup language designer must decide when to use elements, attributes, and data content to represent information. These decisions determine both the degree of structural control and validation provided and the generality of the DTD. This paper discusses the issues involved in those choices, based on the example of support for textual critical editions in the TEI. It then offers three strategies for addressing these issues; all three require no non-SGML structural validation and ultimately produce fully TEI-conformant output. The issues under consideration are relevant not only for the preparation of textual critical editions, but also for other element-vs-attribute decisions and general design concerns pertaining to broad and flexible DTDs, such as those employed by the TEI.

Blue Track

XML in the heart of business applications
Philippe Fontaine, Eric Duchene, and Jean-Christophe Castiaux, all of the SGML Technologies Group

In ever-moving businesses such as the insurance industry, it is crucial that IT departments be able to respond to business requests very quickly in order to shorten time to market. New channels of distribution such as the Web and business-domain value-added networks, with unique constraints and technical requirements, seem to appear every day. To cope with these business and technological issues, large companies have to design open architectures based on standards, and use an application framework to make these architectures standard for future developments. XML can boost the openness capabilities of multi-tiered architectures: XML is not only an efficient development tool, it is also a powerful formal language for modeling both company-oriented business components and interfaces and customer-oriented dialog components and interfaces. This exploitation of XML allows the building of fully reusable components, transforming a simple architecture into a ready-to-use application framework. This paper concentrates on modeling techniques which lead to the most generic and reusable concepts and building blocks.

11:45 - 12:30

Yellow Track
Management of XML documents in an integrated digital library
David Smith, Anne Mahoney, and Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox, Perseus Project

Using a variety of DTDs and markup practices eases the coding of individual documents and often achieves a better fit with their intellectual structures, but it can raise barriers to resource discovery within a digital library. We describe a generalized toolset developed to manage XML documents by creating a partial mapping between elements in a DTD and abstract structural elements. The tools then extract and index structural metadata from these documents in order to deliver document fragments on demand, manage document layout, and support linguistic and conceptual analysis such as feature extraction.

Blue Track

An XML-based N-tier architecture for border management systems
Andy Adler, James MacLean, and Alan Boate, all of AiT

Border management systems need to integrate varied and numerous data (such as traveler’s documents, video surveillance images, messages, and national and international databases) in the context of varying languages, IT resources, hardware requirements, skill sets, and policies. Describes a 5-tier border management system architecture based on modular software components, XML to provide a database-neutral format and the message infrastructure between multiple tiers, and XSL for transformation and formatting.

2:00 - 2:45 Plenary

Closing Keynote: The moon in the water; Thoughts on where we are and where we are going
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, World Wide Web Consortium/MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

Conference wrap-up.

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