Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 21, 2012

BaseX 7.3 (The Summer Edition) is now available!

Filed under: BaseX,XML,XML Database,XML Schema,XPath,XQuery — Patrick Durusau @ 7:47 am

BaseX 7.3 (The Summer Edition) is now available!

From the post:

we are glad to announce a great new release of BaseX, our XML database and XPath/XQuery 3.0 processor! Here are the latest features:

  • Many new internal XQuery Modules have been added, and existing ones have been revised to ensure long-term stability of your future XQuery applications
  • A new powerful Command API is provided to specify BaseX commands and scripts as XML
  • The full-text fuzzy index was extended to also support wildcard queries
  • The simple map operator of XQuery 3.0 gives you a compact syntax to process items of sequences
  • BaseX as Web Application can now start its own server instance
  • All command-line options will now be executed in the given order
  • Charles Foster’s latest XQJ Driver supports XQuery 3.0 and the Update and Full Text extensions

For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, we wish you a nice summer! No worries, we’ll stay busy..

Just in time for the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere!

Something you can toss onto your laptop before you head to the beach.

Err, huh? Well, even if you don’t take BaseX 7.3 to the beach, it promises to be good fun for the summer and more serious work should the occasion arise.

I count twenty-three (23) modules in addition to the XQuery functions specified by the latest XPath/XQuery 3.0 draft.

Just so you know, the BaseX database server listens to port 1984 by default.

June 1, 2012

Are You Going to Balisage?

Filed under: Conferences,RDF,RDFa,Semantic Web,XML,XML Database,XML Schema,XPath,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 2:48 pm

To the tune of “Are You Going to Scarborough Fair:”

Are you going to Balisage?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
Remember me to one who is there,
she once was a true love of mine.

Tell her to make me an XML shirt,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Without any seam or binary code,
Then she shall be a true lover of mine.

….

Oh, sorry! There you will see:

  • higher-order functions in XSLT
  • Schematron to enforce consistency constraints
  • relation of the XML stack (the XDM data model) to JSON
  • integrating JSON support into XDM-based technologies like XPath, XQuery, and XSLT
  • XML and non-XML syntaxes for programming languages and documents
  • type introspection in XQuery
  • using XML to control processing in a document management system
  • standardizing use of XQuery to support RESTful web interfaces
  • RDF to record relations among TEI documents
  • high-performance knowledge management system using an XML database
  • a corpus of overlap samples
  • an XSLT pipeline to translate non-XML markup for overlap into XML
  • comparative entropy of various representations of XML
  • interoperability of XML in web browsers
  • XSLT extension functions to validate OCL constraints in UML models
  • ontological analysis of documents
  • statistical methods for exploring large collections of XML data

Balisage is an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information. Participants typically include XML users, librarians, archivists, computer scientists, XSLT and XQuery programmers, implementers of XSLT and XQuery engines and other markup-related software, Topic-Map enthusiasts, semantic-Web evangelists, members of the working groups which define the specifications, academics, industrial researchers, representatives of governmental bodies and NGOs, industrial developers, practitioners, consultants, and the world’s greatest concentration of markup theorists. Discussion is open, candid, and unashamedly technical.

The Balisage 2012 Program is now available at: http://www.balisage.net/2012/Program.html

May 29, 2012

Destination: Montreal!

If you remember the Saturday afternoon sci-fi movies, Destination: …., then you will appreciate the title for this post. 😉

Tommie Usdin and company just posted: Balisage 2012 Call for Late-breaking News, written in torn bodice style:

The peer-reviewed part of the Balisage 2012 program has been scheduled (and will be announced in a few days). A few slots on the Balisage program have been reserved for presentation of “Late-breaking” material.

Proposals for late-breaking slots must be received by June 15, 2012. Selection of late-breaking proposals will be made by the Balisage conference committee, instead of being made in the course of the regular peer-review process.

If you have a presentation that should be part of Balisage, please send a proposal message as plain-text email to info@balisage.net.

In order to be considered for inclusion in the final program, your proposal message must supply the following information:

  • The name(s) and affiliations of all author(s)/speaker(s)
  • The email address of the presenter
  • The title of the presentation
  • An abstract of 100-150 words, suitable for immediate distribution
  • Disclosure of when and where, if some part of this material has already been presented or published
  • An indication as to whether the presenter is comfortable giving a conference presentation and answering questions in English about the material to be presented
  • Your assurance that all authors are willing and able to sign the Balisage Non-exclusive Publication Agreement (http://www.balisage.net/BalisagePublicationAgreement.pdf) with respect to the proposed presentation

In order to be in serious contention for inclusion in the final program, your proposal should probably be either a) really late-breaking (it happened in the last month or two) or b) a paper, an extended paper proposal, or a very long abstract with references. Late-breaking slots are few and the competition is fiercer than for peer-reviewed papers. The more we know about your proposal, the better we can appreciate the quality of your submission.

Please feel encouraged to provide any other information that could aid the conference committee as it considers your proposal, such as a detailed outline, samples, code, and/or graphics. We expect to receive far more proposals than we can accept, so it’s important that you send enough information to make your proposal convincing and exciting. (This material may be attached to the email message, if appropriate.)

The conference committee reserves the right to make editorial changes in your abstract and/or title for the conference program and publicity. (emphasis added to last sentence)

Read that last sentence again!

The conference committee reserves the right to make editorial changes in your abstract and/or title for the conference program and publicity.

The conference committee might change your abstract and/or title to say something …. controversial? ….attention getting? ….CNN / Slashdot worthy?

Bring it on!

Submit late breaking proposals!

Please!

February 14, 2012

Would You Know “Good” XML If It Bit You?

Filed under: Uncategorized,XML,XML Schema,XPath,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 5:16 pm

XML is a pale imitation of a markup language. It has resulted in real horrors across the markup landscape. After years in its service, I don’t have much hope of that changing.

But, the Princess of the Northern Marches has organized a war council to consider how to stem the tide of bad XML. Despite my personal misgivings, I wish them well and invite you to participate as you see fit.

Oh, and I found this message about the council meeting:

International Symposium on Quality Assurance and Quality Control in XML

Monday August 6, 2012
Hotel Europa, Montréal, Canada

Paper submissions due April 20, 2012.

A one-day discussion of issues relating to Quality Control and Quality Assurance in the XML environment.

XML systems and software are complex and constantly changing. XML documents are highly varied, may be large or small, and often have complex life-cycles. In this challenging environment quality is difficult to define, measure, or control, yet the justifications for using XML often include promises or implications relating to quality.

We invite papers on all aspects of quality with respect to XML systems, including but not limited to:

  • Defining, measuring, testing, improving, and documenting quality
  • Quality in documents, document models, software, transformations, or queries
  • Case studies in the control of quality in an XML environment
  • Theoretical or practical approaches to measuring quality in XML
  • Does the presence of XML, XML schemas, and XML tools make quality checking easier, harder, or even different from other computing environments
  • Should XML transforms and schemas be QAed as software? Or configuration files? Or documents? Does it matter?

Paper submissions due April 20, 2012.

Details at: http://www.balisage.net/QA-QC/

You do have to understand the semantics of even imitation markup languages before mapping them with more robust languages. Enjoy!

February 12, 2012

XML Prague 2012 (proceedings)

Filed under: Conferences,XML,XML Schema,XPath,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 5:11 pm

XML Prague 2012 (proceedings) (PDF)

Fourteen papers by the leading lights in the XML world covering everything from XProc and XQuery to NVDL and JSONiq, and places in between.

Put it on your XML reading list.

October 15, 2011

BaseX

Filed under: BaseX,XML Database,XPath,XQuery — Patrick Durusau @ 4:29 pm

BaseX

From the webpage:

BaseX is a very light-weight and high-performance XML database system and XPath/XQuery processor, including full support for the W3C Update and Full Text extensions. An interactive and user-friendly GUI frontend gives you great insight into your XML documents and collections.

To maximize your productivity and workflows, we offer professional support, tailor-made software solutions and individual trainings on XML, XQuery and BaseX. The product itself is completely Open Source (BSD-licensed) and platform independent. Join our mailing lists to get regular updates!

But most important: BaseX runs out of the box and is easy to use…

For those of us who don’t think documents, even XML documents, are all that weird. 😉

July 1, 2011

Balisage 2011 – Final Program

Filed under: Conferences,XPath,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 2:58 pm

A recent post from Tommie Usdin announce the following additions to the Balisage 2011 program:

  • XQuery and SparQL
  • XQuery and XSLT
  • the Logical Form of a Metadata Record
  • Why is XML a pain to produce?
  • XML Serialization of C# and Java Objects
  • testing XSLT in continuous integration
  • dealing with markup without using words
  • REST for document resource nodes
  • tagging journal article supplemental materials
  • using 15 year old SGML documents in current software

and then goes on to talk about why markup geeks should be at Balisage.

I’ll make that shorter:

If you see either < or > at work or anyone talks about them, you need to be at Balisage 2011.

If you are not a markup geek, you will be one by the time you leave. Road to Damascus sort of experience. Or you will decide to move to San Francisco. Either way, what do you have to lose?

August 2-5, 2011, Montreal, Canada Time is running out!

June 23, 2011

Six Drafts Published Related to XSLT, XQuery, XPath (21 June 2011)

Filed under: XPath,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 1:50 pm

Six Drafts Published Related to XSLT, XQuery, XPath (21 June 2011)

From the post:

Has anyone compared the addressing capabilities of XQuery to HyTime?

May 18, 2011

Balisage 2011 Preliminary Program

Filed under: Conferences,Data Mining,RDF,SPARQL,XPath,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 6:40 pm

At-A-Glance

Program (in full)

From the announcement (Tommie Usdin):

Topics this year include:

  • multi-ended hypertext links
  • optimizing XSLT and XQuery processing
  • interchange, interoperability, and packaging of XML documents
  • eBooks and epub
  • overlapping markup and related topics
  • visualization
  • encryption
  • data mining

The acronyms this year include:

XML XSLT XQuery XDML REST XForms JSON OSIS XTemp RDF SPARQL XPath

New this year will be:

Lightning talks: an opportunity for participants to say what they think, simply, clearly, and persuasively.

As I have said before, simply the best conference of the year!

Conference site: http://www.balisage.net/

Registration: http://www.balisage.net/registration.html

February 13, 2011

Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath

Filed under: XPath,XSLT,XTM — Patrick Durusau @ 6:17 am

A new edition of Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath by Ken Holman is out.

While not topic map specific, ;-), this is one of the two resources you need for transformations getting to (or from) topic maps using XSLT and XPath. The other one, would be: XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0: programmer’s reference. (You can also use both of these for non-topic map, XML based work.)

While your looking at Ken’s training resources, note his series on UBL (Universal Business Language).

I mention that because the greater the exposure of business systems the greater the need for the mapping of semantics (that means topic maps).

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