Extreme Markup Languages 2000

Wednesday, August 16, 2000

Yellow Track

AtomicML: An extremely usable generalized markup language
Neill A. Kipp, NetDecide, Inc.

With XML, as with SGML before it, one can create large domain-specific languages very quickly. Long-term productivity, however, depends on a component’s usability in the entire development cycle. Languages, too, must be easy to write, read, debug, maintain, modify, and extend. AtomicML is a generalized markup and data structuring language for developing domain-specific languages that uses indentation levels to express relationships. It is smaller, faster, less error-prone, and cheaper to run, and use than XML. Users (N=6) comment that it generally easier and faster to read when structures do not nest too deeply. AtomicML comes with a suite of language processing components, AtomicStyle for semantic binding, and AtomicDecl for generating complete context-free language solutions. AtomicML, with all its support components, is free to download and use from http://www.atomicml.org/.

Blue Track

XML, groves and predicate-based processing languages
José Carlos Ramalho and Pedro Rangel Henriques, both of University of Minho

XML documents are readily represented in groves or other tree-like structures. The meanings of predicate-based processing languages can be defined in terms of operations which traverse the document tree. Together, the data structure and the operations make an XML Virtual Machine (XVM), which we are implementing at the moment. Using the XVM makes it much simpler to specify the semantics of any language belonging to the family of predicate-based languages (such as a document query language and a content constraint language). This point will be illustrated with the complete specification of CCL (Content Constraint Language for XML documents). Attribute grammars are used as the specification formalism.

9:45 - 10:30

Yellow Track

Beyond schemas
Scott Vorthmann, Extensibility, Inc., and Jonathan Robie, Software AG

The Schema Adjunct Framework is an XML-based language used to associate task-specific metadata with schemas and their instances, effectively extending the power of existing XML schema languages such as DTDs or XML Schema. This is useful because in many environments additional information which is typically not available in the schema itself is needed to process XML documents. Such information includes mappings to relational databases, indexing parameters for native XML databases, business rules for additional validation, internationalization and localization parameters, or parameters used for presentation and input forms. Some of this information is used for domain-specific validation, some to provide information for domain-specific processing. No schema language provides support for all the information that might be provided at this level, nor should it — instead, we suggest a way to associate such information with a schema without affecting the underlying schema language.

Blue Track

Path predicate calculus: Towards a logic formalism for multimedia XML query languages
Peiya Liu, Amit Chakraborty, and Liang H. Hsu, all of Siemens Corporate Research, Inc.

Many document query languages have been proposed for specifying document retrieval. But the formalisms for document query languages are still underdeveloped. An adequate formalism is critical for query language development and standardization. Relational algebra and relational calculus are embedded in most relational query languages, but due to the different underlying data models, they cannot be directly used for tree document query languages. We propose a logic formalism called path predicate calculus, based on the tree document model and paths, for querying XML. In the path predicate calculus, the atomic formulas are element predicates rather than the relation predicates of relational calculus. In a path calculus query language, queries describe a desired document tree by specifying path predicates that the tree document elements must satisfy.

11:00 - 11:45 Plenary

Using UML to define XML document types
W. Eliot Kimber and John Heintz, both of DataChannel, Inc.

UML (Unified Modeling Language) models can be used to define XML document types instead of DTDs or schemas. The XML encoding of data is fundamentally an implementation representation of data that conforms to some higher-level abstract data model or object model. In this way, the use of UML to define the XML implementation of objects is exactly analogous to using UML to define the Java or CORBA or C++ or SQL (Standard Query Language) implementations of those objects. Thus there is assumed to be a more abstract data model of which the XML is an implementation, referred to as the "XML implementation representation" of the data. By using UML stereotypes to map application-specific types to XML syntactic constructs, we show how UML can be used in the case of a sample DTD to map abstract information data models to XML-specific implementation models and illustrate a sample program for generating XML DTD-syntax declaration sets from their corresponding UML models.

11:45 - 12:30 Plenary

Keynote: In my head are many facts of which I am not certain I am sure
B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies, Inc.

In 1951 Oscar Hammerstein II put into King Mongkut’s mouth words that describe a state of confusion widespread in the markup community right now:

  "There are times I think I think I am not sure of what I absolutely know
  Very often find confusion in conclusion I concluded long ago
  In my head are many facts that as a student I studied to be true
  In my head are many facts of which I am not certain I am sure"

A common theme throughout this conference is the need to rethink commonly held beliefs and the erosion of comfortable "truths".

2:00 - 2:45 Plenary

The descriptive/procedural distinction is flawed
Allen Renear, Brown University

The traditional distinction between descriptive and procedural markup is flawed. It conflates questions of mood (indicative vs. imperative statements about a document) and domain (the kinds of objects named in those statements). It also fails to describe adequately the use of markup by authors rather than by later encoders. An adequate markup taxonomy must, among other things, incorporate distinctions such as those developed in contemporary "speech-act theory".

2:45 - 3:30 Plenary

Markup’s current imbalance
Paul Caton, Brown University

Broadly, markup schemes create two kinds of elements for textual content: those which are "structural" and those which capture facts such as names, dates, etc. The theoretical justification of this approach lies in the claim of DeRose, et. al (1990) that text is an ordered hierarchy of content objects (OHCO). But OHCO concentrates on the visible part of the textual iceberg; there is a lurking danger in what is kept from view. The more we train ourselves to describe texts as inert structures, the less we train ourselves to recognize and analyze rhetorical strategies. The more we use one particular approach to markup without exploring alternatives, the greater the risk that we end up thinking we know an elephant because we can see its tail.

The following sessions are reserved for technically newsworthy submissions so late-breaking that the normal lead time required for peer review is impossible.

4:00 - 4:45 Late Breaking News

Yellow Track

JDOM
Elliotte Rusty Harold, Polytechnic University

JDOM is an open source, tree-based, Java API for processing XML documents designed with simplicity and convenience as its foremost purposes. At a high level it's similar to the DOM, but since JDOM was designed specifically for Java rather than for multiple languages, it feels much more natural and "right" to Java programmers. This talk explains the basics of the JDOM API for reading and writing XML. It also compares and contrasts JDOM with the existing SAX and DOM APIs to help you choose which API to use for which projects.

Blue Track

XHub: An Online Service for Creating OEB eBooks from XML Documents
Elli Mylonas, Brown University

Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group has developed a web-based environment, based on an underlying XSLT conversion architecture, to support the creation of OEB (Open eBook Publication Structure) ebooks from XML inputs. This service allows users to perform intelligent conversions of documents in formats like XHTML, TEI, DocBook, and others, into XML eBook Publications. This presentation will describe the design of XHub, some of the interesting problems solved in the course of its development, and some broader issues related to managing real-world XML transformations. We will also describe plans to use XHub as a test bed for exploring topics such as annotation exchange.

4:45 - 5:30 Late Breaking News

Yellow Track

Title: The Granby Suite: Building XML Search and Delivery Architectures Stephen Ramsey and Kirk V. Hastings, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia.

The current search and delivery architectures available for XML/SGML documents tend to be deficient in one or more of the following areas: modularity, extensibility, portability, configurability, and price. A brief discussion of these problems acts as introduction to an XML search architecture proposed to surmount these problems, the Granby Suite. The Granby Suite is a set of Java Servlets and libraries which encapsulate the functionality of Sgrep (a free XML/SGML search engine developed at the University of Helsinki). The Granby Suite is designed to be highly modular, readily extensible, configurable for both users and software engineers, and free.

Blue Track

Technical implications of using the XML 1.0 standard for vertical market standards definition
Gabriel Minton, Ultraprise Corporation

During development of the Mortgage Industry Standards and Maintenance Organization (MISMO XML) standard a number of technical issues surfaced. These include, but are not limited to: Scoping and initial division of labor (based on volunteers); Process area creation and definition; Designed to span transactions, not support only one (X12); Data dictionary creation (including web software we created to aid the process); XML element creation and modeling; Elements vs. attributes ("mixed" approach); DTD vs. Schema discussion (not standardized, but architect for use in the future); Implementation of the standard; Extendible architectures; the need to build off the standard- the need for automatic normalization of data back to the standard; "Automagic" DTD creation; Where we store DTD's (relative) This is not a case study. Rather, it is the method, process, means, and architectural framework that is in use today and working in the mortgage industry in hopes that the ideas and means could be reused in other vertical industries. The problem we are trying to solve is adoption of technology and methods for building XML as a solution into an existing infrastructure and in between existing trading partners. Everyone pretty much agrees that XML is "cool", but few people know how they can start to employ it today.

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