xml in action an overview of xml today computers in libraries march 16, 2001 darlene fichter...
TRANSCRIPT
XML in Action An Overview of XML Today
Computers In LibrariesMarch 16, 2001
Darlene Fichter
University of Saskatchewan [email protected] library.usask.ca/~fichter/
Outline XML in a Nutshell What’s Real and What’s Hype? XML Applications
Publishing Digital Library/Full Text Cataloguing Other
XML in a Nutshell Structured data in a text file via markup Looks like HTML but isn't Verbose text, isn't meant to be read New, but not that new License-free, platform-independent and
well-supported A family of technologies
(adapted from Bert Bos, http://www.si.uniovi.es/mirror/www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points)
Current State of Affairs XML solves real world problems DTD’s based on XML Standards are multiplying like
rabbits (both good and bad) Major stakeholders bought in – IBM,
Microsoft, SAP, …
Significant Forces Advancing XML Adoption Internationalized media-independent
electronic publishing Definition of platform-independent
protocols for the exchange of data electronic commerce
Information delivery to user agents automatic processing after receipt
XML Applications - Now we see them! SMIL MATHml - Many academic
applications More examples: http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/acadapps.html
SMIL Synchronised Multimedia Integration
Language
Integration of multimedia with text, audio, video
Support in RealPlayer & Windows Media Player
This Day in History from the History ChannelPorsche
XML Standards – Information Food Chain Publishing
Digital rights (EBX,…) E-books News (RSS, ICE, nift, NewsML)
Digital Libraries / Full Text EAD TEI Lite DDI (Data Librarians)
XML – Food Chain con’t Cataloguing
Cheshire Cat (MARC as SGML) Dublin Core CORC
Other: National Library of Medicine
Example - EBX The Electronic Book Exchange (EBX) Working Group is an
organization of companies, organizations, and individuals developing a standard for protecting copyright in electronic books and for distributing electronic books among publishers, distributors, retailers, libraries, and consumers.
http://www.ebxwg.org/
EBX - Why? Open, freely available, and commercially
viable standards for the secure transmission of electronic books
Solve issues as the purchase, sale, lending, giving, printing, subscribing, and licensing of electronic books
Independent of content format Make one wheel, not 20 Speed up tool development
TEI - Example University of Virginia, Electronic Text Center
Scope
The Electronic Text Center's holdings include approximately 51,000 on- and off-line humanities texts in twelve languages, with more than 350,000 related images (book illustrations, covers, manuscripts, newspaper pages, page images of Special Collections books, museum objects,
etc.)
OEB - Open E-Book In September 1999, the group
published the Open E-Book 1.0 Publication Structure
The Open E-book standard is essentially XHTML—that is, a clean version of HTML 4.0 along with support for CSS.
www.openebook.org
Data Documentation Initiative is A metadata standard for the social
sciences Developed by data librarians and
producers from the USA, Canada, and Europe
To provide a seamless interface between the user, data files and their documentation.
Why DDI?
Data Libraries had: Extensive collections of code books,
questionnaires and other documents about surveys
Desire to support very specific searches Across multiple data archives and
repositories Legacy conversion problem
What would DDI do?
1. Search through detailed metadata of multiple data sources located at several data archives with a
single search operation.
What would DDI do?
2. Once a data file was located, the user should be able to conduct statistical analyzes
interactively, view the data statistically or
geographically and even subset cases.
MARC as SGML? Need for a more universal way to
encode descriptive information -not everyone has library catalog software
Looking beyond MARC for better retrieval systems to SGML and XML
Cheshire II Cheshire II experimental online
catalog system was developed using SGML
Address two problems of subject searching, search failure (no results) and information overload
RDF - Resource Description Framework Framework for metadata Interoperability of information exchange
between applications Applications:
Resource discovery Knowledge sharing and exchange Content rating Intellectual property rights
XML Today - Intranets Intranets
Data interchange More and more external content
providers offer XML formatted content WAP and other devices are feeding the
XML fever (create once, publish many)
Intranets & Libraries XML makes it easier to blend
external and internal content Role of the librarians becomes one
of mapping and packaging for best use
Not a Silver Bullet
“XML is not the answer to all the world’s problems—it creates new problems, that are awfully damn interesting to solve.”
Simon St. Laurent,author of XML: A Primer, on the xml-dev mailing list