Day 2 (2016)

Thursday | Friday | Saturday

Schedule for Friday

chaired by yours truly Mohamed Zergaoui (morning) and Jirka Kosek (afternoon)

Session details

oXygen @ XML Prague

George Bina, Syncro Soft

A look back through the years at XML Prague with a focus on oXygen contributions.

Accessible EPUB: let’s do it!

Romain Deltour, DAISY<

Access to information and knowledge should be universal. That should not be controversial, but even today –in 2016– too few digital publications are “born accessible”. How can we raise the bar for inclusive publishing? This article presents best practices and guidance on how to make accessible EPUB publications.

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Extending CSS with XSL-FO, XSL-FO with CSS

Tony Graham, Antenna House

Discusses the Antenna House approach to merging the features of XSL-FO and CSS in AH Formatter. This showcases some of the features of one stylesheet language that have crossed between the two flavours of AH Formatter to become an extension in the other; for example, CSS numbering styles in XSL-FO and XSL-FO table header and footer control in CSS. AH Formatter uses a common layout engine when formatting either XSL-FO or CSS, plus there are a lot of common properties in XSL 1.1 and CSS 2.0. Allowing properties to cross over to the other stylesheet language can be as simple as adding a prefixed property in CSS or adding a namespaced property in XSL-FO. In some cases, however, only part of the implementation in one language can or should be reimplemented for the other, and there are some parts for which it is not practical to reimplement for the other stylesheet language.

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Virtual Document Management

Ari Nordström, Creative Words

The paper describes a proposed solution to the lack of proper identification and versioning of documents passing through a series of loosely connected systems, resulting in a lack of tracebility, the duplication of information and a host of other problems.

The solution is a passive tracking system that logs transaction events occurring when a document passes through each system and uses them to build a workflow and versioning history of the document in the tracking system. This versioning information can then be made available to, and used by, the participating systems to locate and query past ersions, effectively creating what can be described as a virtual document management system.

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Define and Conquer – Using Semantic XML for Functional Software Specifications

Patrik Stellmann, GDV DL

The XML universe provides several standards and tools for technical documentation. This paper introduces an approach to functionally specifying software with XML tools and provides an overview of the challenges that we solved. An essential part is to use a highly specialized semantic XML schema customized for the specific enterprise architecture. Thus, the general idea of “highly specialized semantics” is introduced and some hints on how to define and maintain such a schema are given. This paper is based on over three years of experience using the combination of oXygen XML Editor and DITA. The concept and ideas should be applicable to other XML based documentation standards and editors as well.

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Subjugating Data Flow Programming

Alex Miłowski and Norman Walsh, MarkLogic

XProc 1.0 is data flow language and W3C recommendation that provides the ability to describe steps for processing XML documents for some end purpose. While there has been some adoption, it has not been as successful as we would have liked. In this paper, we examine the issues surrounding the usability of XProc 1.0 pipelines, rethink our end goals, and describe a proposal for a new direction.

Schematron QuickFix – a simple language to specify the actions that will be used to fix the Schematron detected issues, layered on top of XPath and XSLT, and integrated within Schematron schemas through the annotation support

Octavian Nadolu, Syncro Soft and Nico Kutscherauer, data2type GmbH

Two years ago, the idea of Schematron QuickFix (SQF) was discussed during the XML Prague conference and it started to take shape. It has now reached a point where we have a draft specification available, a W3C community group dedicated to XML Quick Fixes, and two independent SQF implementations. The first draft of the Schematron QuickFix specification was published in April 2015 and it is now available on GitHub and within the W3C “Quick-Fix Support for XML Community Group”. Schematron QuickFix defines a simple language to specify the actions that are used to fix the detected issues, layered on top of XPath and XSLT, and integrated within Schematron schemas through the Schematron annotation support. In this session, we will present various use cases that are solved with Schematron QuickFixes, ranging from simple to complex, sometimes involving changes in multiple locations within a document, or even in external documents. We will also discuss the language and challenges related to the SQF implementation. Join us to learn how SQF can be useful in your next XML project!

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Transforming JSON using XSLT 3.0

Michael Kay, Saxonica

The XSLT 3.0 and XPath 3.1 specifications, now at Candidate Recommendation status, introduces capabilities for importing and exporting JSON data, either by converting it to XML, or by representing it natively using new data structures: maps and arrays. The purpose of this paper is to explore the usability of these facilities for tackling some practical transformation tasks. Two representative transformation tasks are considered, and solutions for each are provided either by converting the JSON data to XML and transforming that in the traditional way, or by transforming the native representation of JSON as maps and arrays. The exercise demonstrates that the absence of parent or ancestor axes in the native representation of JSON means that the transformation task needs to be approached in a very different way.

Data Just Wants to Be Format-Neutral

Steven Pemberton, CWI

Invisible XML is a technique for treating any parsable format as if it were XML, and thus allowing any parsable object to be injected into an XML pipeline. The parsing can also be undone, thus allowing roundtripping. This paper discusses issues with automatic serialisation, and the relationship between Invisible XML grammars and data schemas.

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From XML to RDF step by step: approaches for leveraging XML workflows with linked data

Marta Borriello, Vistatec, Christian Dirschl, Wolters Kluwer Deutschland GmbH, Axel Polleres, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Phil Ritchie, Vistatec, Frank Salliau, iMinds, Felix Sasaki, DFKI / W3C Fellow, Giannis Stoitsis, Agro-Know

We will discuss the motivation for integrating RDF and XML. We will look at various business case scenarios that can benefit from this integration and we will discuss several approaches to realize the integration. Finally, we will look into technical solutions that integrate the actual XML and RDF technology stacks.

slides | live demo