xml in action an overview of xml today computers in libraries march 16, 2001 darlene fichter...

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XML in Action An Overview of XML Today Computers In Libraries March 16, 2001 Darlene Fichter University of Saskatchewan Libraries [email protected] library.usask.ca/~fichter/

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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

News! Many web sites’ headline services are utilizing one of the

XML News DTDs such as RSS

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

Digital Texts and Documents EAD – talked about by the next

speaker TEI OEB DDI

TEI & XML – TEI Lite Supports 4 levels of coding

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.

Nesstar Explorer

http://www.nesstar.org/explorer/

From Documents to Description MARC Dublin Core RDF

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 in Use - Web RSS Syndicated content E-books Data interchange for e-commerce

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

Thank you!

Darlene Fichter University of Saskatchewan [email protected] library.usask.ca/~fichter/