Archive for the ‘XML Schema’ Category

“…XML User Interfaces” As in Using XML?

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013

International Symposium on Native XML user interfaces

This came across the wire this morning and I need your help interpreting it.

Why would you want to have an interface to XML?

All these years I have been writing XML in Emacs because XML wasn’t supposed to have an interface.

Brave hearts, male, female and unknown, struggling with issues too obscure for mere mortals.

Now I find that isn’t supposed to be so? You can imagine my reaction.

I moved my laptop a bit closer to the peat fire to make sure I read it properly. Waiting for the ox cart later this week to take my complaint to the local bishop about this disturbing innovation.

;-)

15 March 2013 — Peer review applications due
19 April 2013 — Paper submissions due
19 April 2013 — Applications due for student support awards due
21 May 2013 — Speakers notified
12 July 2013 — Final papers due
5 August 2013 — International Symposium on Native XML user interfaces
6–9 August 2013 — Balisage: The Markup Conference

International Symposium on
Native XML user interfaces

Monday August 5, 2013 Hotel Europa, Montréal, Canada

XML is everywhere. It is created, gathered, manipulated, queried, browsed, read, and modified. XML systems need user interfaces to do all of these things. How can we make user interfaces for XML that are powerful, simple to use, quick to develop, and easy to maintain?

How are we building user interfaces today? How can we build them tomorrow? Are we using XML to drive our user interfaces? How?

This one-day symposium is devoted to the theory and practice of user interfaces for XML: the current state of implementations, practical case studies, challenges for users, and the outlook for the future development of the technology.

Relevant topics include:

  • Editors customized for specific purposes or users
  • User interfaces for creation, management, and use of XML documents
  • Uses of XForms
  • Making tools for creation of XML textual documents
  • Using general-purpose user-interface libraries to build XML interfaces
  • Looking at XML, especially looking at masses of XML documents
  • XML, XSLT, and XQuery in the browser
  • Specialized user interfaces for specialized tasks
  • XML vocabularies for user-interface specification

Presentations can take a variety of forms, including technical papers, case studies, and tool demonstrations (technical overviews, not product pitches).

This is the same conference I wrote about in: Markup Olympics (Balisage) [No Drug Testing].

In times of lean funding for conferences, if you go to a conference this year, it really should be Balisage.

You will be the envy of your co-workers and have tales to tell your grandchildren.

Not bad for one conference registration fee.

Posted in Conferences, Interface Research/Design, XML, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, XSLT | No Comments »

Markup Olympics (Balisage) [No Drug Testing]

Thursday, January 10th, 2013

Markup athletes take heart! Unlike venues that intrude into the personal lives of competitors, there are no, repeat no drug tests for presenters at Balisage!

Fear no trainer betrayals or years of being dogged by second-raters in the press.

Eat, drink, visit, ???, present, in the company of your peers.

The more traditional call for participation, yawn, has the following details:

Dates:

15 March 2013 – Peer review applications due
19 April 2013 – Paper submissions due
19 April 2013 – Applications due for student support awards due
21 May 2013 – Speakers notified
12 July 2013 – Final papers due

5 August 2013 – Pre-conference Symposium on XForms
6-9 August 2013 – Balisage: The Markup Conference

From the call:

Balisage is where people interested in descriptive markup meet each year in August for informed technical discussion, occasionally impassioned debate, good coffee, and the incomparable ambience of one of North America’s greatest cities, Montreal. We welcome anyone interested in discussing the use of descriptive markup to build strong, lasting information systems.

Practitioner or theorist, tool-builder or tool-user, student or lecturer — you are invited to submit a paper proposal for Balisage 2013. As always, papers at Balisage can address any aspect of the use of markup and markup languages to represent information and build information systems. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • XML and related technologies
  • Non-XML markup languages
  • Big Data and XML
  • Implementation experience with XML parsing, XSLT processors, XQuery processors, XML databases, XProc integrations, or any markup-related technology
  • Semantics, overlap, and other complex fundamental issues for markup languages
  • Case studies of markup design and deployment
  • Quality of information in markup systems
  • JSON and XML
  • Efficiency of Markup Software
  • Markup systems in and for the mobile web
  • The future of XML and of descriptive markup in general
  • Interesting applications of markup

In addition, please consider becoming a Peer Reviewer. Reviewers play a critical role towards the success of Balisage. They review blind submissions — on topics that interest them — for technical merit, interest, and applicability. Your comments and recommendations can assist the Conference Committee in creating the program for Balisage 2013!

How:

More IQ per square foot than any other conference you will attend in 2013!

Posted in Conferences, XML, XML Database, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, XSLT | 3 Comments »

Balisage 2013 – Dates/Location

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

Tommie Usdin just posted email with the Balisage 2013 dates and location:

Montreal, Hotel Europa, August 5 – 9 , 2013

Hope that works with everything else.

That’s the entire email so I don’t know what was meant by:

Hope that works with everything else.

Short of it being your own funeral, open-heart surgery or giving birth (to your first child), I am not sure what “everything else” there could be?

You get a temporary excuse for the second two cases and a permanent excuse for the first one.

Now’s a good time to hint about plane fare plus hotel and expenses for Balisage as a stocking stuffer.

And to wish a happy holiday Tommie Usdin and to all the folks at Mulberry Technology who make Balisage possible all of us. Each and every one.

Posted in Conferences, XML, XML Database, XML Query Rewriting, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, XSLT, XTM | No Comments »

BaseX 7.3 (The Summer Edition) is now available!

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

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.

Posted in BaseX, XML, XML Database, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery | No Comments »

Are You Going to Balisage?

Friday, June 1st, 2012

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

Posted in Conferences, RDF, RDFa, Semantic Web, XML, XML Database, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, XSLT | No Comments »

Destination: Montreal!

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

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!

Posted in Conferences, XML, XML Data Clustering, XML Query Rewriting, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, XSLT | No Comments »

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

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

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!

Posted in Uncategorized, XML, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, XSLT | 2 Comments »

XML Prague 2012 (proceedings)

Sunday, February 12th, 2012

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.

Posted in Conferences, XML, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, XSLT | No Comments »

Development Life Cycle and Tools for Data Exchange Specification

Saturday, December 24th, 2011

Development Life Cycle and Tools for Data Exchange Specification (2008) by KC Morris , Puja Goyal.

Abstract:

In enterprise integration, a data exchange specification is an architectural artifact that evolves along with the business. Developing and maintaining a coherent semantic model for data exchange is an important, yet non-trivial, task. A coherent semantic model of data exchange specifications supports reuse, promotes interoperability, and, consequently, reduces integration costs. Components of data exchange specifications must be consistent and valid in terms of agreed upon standards and guidelines. In this paper, we describe an activity model and NIST developed tools for the creation, test, and maintenance of a shared semantic model that is coherent and supports scalable, standards-based enterprise integration. The activity model frames our research and helps define tools to support the development of data exchange specification implemented using XML (Extensible Markup Language) Schema.

A paper that makes it clear that interoperability is not a trivial task. Could be helpful in convincing the ‘powers that be’ that projects on semantic integration or interoperability have to be properly resourced in order to have a useful result.

Posted in Integration, XML, XML Schema | No Comments »

Manufacturing System Integration Division – MSID XML Testbed (NIST)

Saturday, December 24th, 2011

Manufacturing System Integration Division – MSID XML Testbed (NIST)

From the website:

NIST’s efforts to define methods and tools for developing XML Schemas to support systems integraton will help you effectively build and deploy XML Schemas amongst partners in integration projects. Through the Manufacturing Interoperability Program (MIP) XML Testbed, NIST provides guidance on how to build XML Schemas as well as a collection of tools that will help with the process allowing projects to more quickly and efficiently meet their goals.

The NIST XML Schema development and testing process is documented as the Model Development Life Cycle, which is an activity model for the creation, use, and maintenance of shared semantic models, and has been used to frame our research and development tools. We have worked with a number of industries on refining and automating the specification process and provide a wealth of information on how to use XML to address your integration needs.

On this site you will find a collection of tools and ideas to help you in developing high quality XML schemas. The tools available on this site are offered to the general public free of charge. They have been developed by the United States Government and as such are not subject to copyright or other restrictions.

If you are interested in seeing the tools extended or having some of your work included in the service please contact us.

The thought did occur to me that you could write an XML schema that governs the documentation of the subjects, their properties and merging conditions in your information systems. Perhaps even to the point of using XSLT to run against the resulting documentation to create SQL statements for the integration of information resources held in your database (or accessible therefrom).

Posted in Integration, XML, XML Schema | No Comments »