Sessions 2013

Friday, February 8th

See separate page for details about the pre-conference day

Saturday, February 9th

Sunday, February 10th

Session details

Building a Personalized Communication Platform using Open Standards

Nick Van den Bleeken (Inventive Designers)

Communicating with customers in the manner they prefer, with the information they find interesting, is getting ever more challenging with rise of mobile and social media. This paper will discuss how we have built a Personalized Multi-channel Communication Platform using open standards, what extensions to those standards were required and what challenges we faced creating the platform.

I’m currently R&D Manager at Inventive Designers. I’m passionate about XML related technologies, mobile, cloud computing, web and document technology in general. Since 2005 I’m part of the Forms WG at W3C. Currently I’m an editor of the XForms specification.

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Bringing NoSQL Datastores into an XQuery Playground

Cezar Andrei (Oracle), Matthias Brantner (28msec) and Juan Zacarias (Oracle)

JSONiq is an extension of XQuery making JSON a first class citizen within XQuery. The paper proposes three JSONiq modules to interface with three major NoSQL key-value data stores – namely MongoDB, Couchbase Server, and Oracle NoSQL DB. Using JSONiq and those three modules NoSQL developers can use the power of XQuery to process JSON data in their favorite NoSQL Datastore.

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Conveying Layout Information with CSSa

Gerrit Imsieke (Le-tex publishing services Gmbh)

This paper introduces the concept of CSS properties as attributes (CSSa) for transporting layout information in XML document conversion pipelines. CSSa may be regarded as an orthogonal layer for presentation, analogous to RDFa as an orthogonal layer for semantics.

The paper sketches components of a formal CSSa specification, particularly a Relax NG schema for CSSa property names and permitted values, as per the underlying CSS specs. It then presents some CSSa applications: a CSS→CSSa parser for HTML documents; “Hub XML,” a rather low-level interchange format for formatted documents, based on flattened DocBook and CSSa; a property mapping for IDML; device-specific CSS validation profiles (for example, checking Kindle compatibility of an EPUB file) that fit in the RNG/Schematron-based epubcheck infrastructure; a conversion pipeline where CSSa plays a crucial role in several regards: Word manuscript → Hub XML → custom TEI → HTML preview → IDML (InDesign).

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Efficient XML processing with XSLT 3.0 and higher order functions

Abel Braaksma (Abrasoft)

XSLT 3.0 has become a fully functional language with the embrace of functions as first class citizens. This paper introduces you to the new concepts of higher order functions, including function items, anonymous functions and partial function application. It explains the new syntax and shows new features of XSLT and XPath that are tightly integrated with function items, like maps, accumulators and the new XPath functions like fold-left/right and that take functions as arguments.

Abel Braaksma is owner of Abrasoft and creator or the new and upcoming streaming XSLT 3.0 processor Exselt. He has more than 15 years experience with XML and related technologies and is currently an Invited Expert of the XSLT and XPath working groups at W3C. He can be reached about anything XML or F# related at info@abrasoft.net or for the Exselt processor at info@exselt.net. For his current thoughts on technologies, you can visit his blog at Under My Hat.

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eXistential Issues in Farming

Ari Nordström (Condesign)

The Federation of Swedish Farmers – LRF – provides its 170,000 members with a yearly printed checklist document used to indicate compliance with existing state and EU farming regulations. This document, also available as a web-based checklist form fed from a central SQL database, is out of date almost as soon as it leaves the printers.

The LRF wants to provide customised PDFs to their members, with member-specific checklists and corresponding help texts – facts – instead of today’s 100+ page,fine print document. Most of this is available in the SQL database – the web form answers, with a member’s answers and comments, are saved and could be used to generate such customised PDFs on request, but the SQL database is ill suited for the task.

This paper describes the solution currently being implemented. It consists of an external eXist-based publishing server, to which the SQL DB contents are exported nightly. The quality of the exported XML varies, with factual texts in HTML fragments, etc, requiring cleanup and conversions in stages before they are converted to a publishing XML format. The solution uses XProc pipelines and XSLT to handle most of this processing. A yearly volume of roughly 40,000 documents is expected.

Additional requirements now include writing everything but the checklist questions themselves in eXist. For this, an oXygen/eXist system using a DocBook subset is used, with more pipelines and XSLT for processing currently being implemented.

Ari Nordström is the resident XML guy at Condesign AB in Göteborg, Sweden. His information structures and solutions are used by Volvo Cars, Ericsson, and many others, with more added every year. His favourite XML specification remains XLink so quite a few of his frequent talks and presentations on XML focus on linking.

Ari spends some of his spare time projecting films at the Draken Cinema in Göteborg, which should explain why he wants to automate cinemas using XML. He now realises it’s too late, however.

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Fully automatic database publishing with the speedata Publisher

Patrick Gundlach (Speedata)

XSL-FO is the current standard for creating paged media with XML. Due to the complete lack of built in capabilities to dynamically optimize the layout, XSL-FO is only suitable for simple documents.

We at speedata have build an Open Source replacement for XSL-FO that allows arbitrary complex documents. It has proven its usefulness in various commercial projects.

Patrick Gundlach is combining typography and database knowledge for more than 15 years now. In 2009 he founded the company speedata that is specialized in fully automatic database publishing.

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Introducing MicroXML

Uche Ogbuji (Zepheira LLC)

Parts of the XML community have always grumbled that XML is difficult to understand and process. XML is fundamentally complex, for a variety of historical reasons, and people have been proposing simplified versions for over a decade. Others have been advocating alternatives, including YAML,JSON and even HTML5. Recently, under the W3C Community Group process a serious effort was undertaken to produce and formalize a significantly simpler variant of XML, releasing a first public draft of MicroXML. MicroXML is a subset of XML. Its 8-page draft specification covers not only the syntax, but also the design goals, a data model (think the XPath data model or InfoSet, but much simpler) and even non-normative sections with a suggested JSON representation and a log of changes to XML. MicroXML represents an enormous simplification of XML without losing its essential character, which benefits developers as well as users. In fact there are already several experimental implementations of MicroXML just months after its first public draft release, in Java, Javascript and Python.

This presentation is an introduction to MicroXML aimed at the seasoned XML user, detailing its origins and motivations, its design goals, technical differences from XML 1.x and related technologies, and its data model. The presentation will also touch on the process and possible roadmap for MicroXML as well as some efforts building on MicroXML to offer similarly micro schema languages, transformation languages etc. and also to discuss error recovery and such.

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Local Knowledge for In Situ Services

Alex Milowski (ILCC, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh) and Henry Thompson (ILCC, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh)

Many Semantic Web applications rely on the idea that all data is globally known, readily accessible, encoded using some RDF mechanism, and translatable into graph structures. This model ignores the reality of local knowledge and data processing by local services (e.g. Web applications). This paper explores the usefulness of encoding local knowledge with RDFa for Web applications and demonstrates local services via an implementation of the RDFa API.

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Multi-user interaction using client-side XSLT

Michael Kay (Saxonica) and O’Neil Delpratt (Saxonica)

We describe two use-case applications to illustrate the capabilities of the first XSLT 2.0 processor designed to run within web browsers. The first is a technical documentation application, which permits browsing and searching in a intuitive way. We then present a multi-player chess game application; using the same XSLT 2.0 processor as the first application, it is in fact very different in purpose and design in that we provide multi-user interaction on the GUI and implement communication via a social media network: namely Twitter.

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Quo vadis XML?

Maik Stührenberg (Bielefeld University)

XML has been a success story for nearly 15 years as a technical basis for a large variety of markup languages. However, during its ongoing development XML and its accompanying specifications have grown in complexity. While there are projects that try to reduce this complexity by addressing at least one of XML’s building blocks, that is the linearisation, the formal model, the validation, or the differentiation between level and layer, other voices complain that some of XML’s building blocks are still not complex enough. In this paper we will present the components of an XML-based markup language (including the respective limitations) and some alternative notation formats that try to address specific limitations. The goal of this paper is not to present new findings but to give a survey about the current state.

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Embracing JSON? Of course, but how?

Eric Van der Vlist (Dyomedea)

JSON is now widely used to exchange data over the web and it is crucial for the XML toolkit to seamlessly support JSON.

This is not new and a number of solutions have already been proposed for this purpose. Unfortunately even if the JSON data model is relatively simple it is nor directly compatible with the XML data model and none of these solutions seem to clearly dominate the landscape.

The purpose of this talk is to classify and review different proposals and briefly present a new proposal that will probably be considered as a total heresy by XML fundamentalists.

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RDF for the XML Enthusiast

John Snelson (MarkLogic)<

For those of us who are used to using XML, every problem might seem like a nail – to be solved with our XML hammer. What use is RDF? After all, XML can model graphs with links.

However the truth of the matter is that XML and RDF are complimentary data formats, and we can increase our toolbox with an understanding of RDF, what problems it is good at solving, and how it can enhance the XML we are already using.

This paper discusses the similarities and differences between XML and RDF. It compares their respective query lan- guages, XQuery and SPARQL, and highlights the use cases which would be difficult with XML and XQuery, but are easy with RDF and SPARQL. A pragmatic approach is taken, and a familiarity with XML is assumed.

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Representing Change Tracking in XML Markup

Robin La Fontaine (DeltaXML Ltd), Tristan Mitchell (DeltaXML Ltd) and Nigel Whitaker (DeltaXML Ltd)

This paper presents work done over the past two years to provide an improved change tracking representation for documents in XML. The original intention was to provide improved change tracking for the OpenDocument format (ODF), but the approach is generic and is therefore potentially applicable to other XML document formats and even XML data.

A detailed specification was developed and prototype implementations developed in Abiword and KWord to demonstrate interoperability. However, developers of the main ODF office packages found the approach a challenge and were less keen to implement it and are currently looking at other options.

This paper presents the basic design principles behind the proposal, and how these are satisfied in the approach taken. Since the initial work, there has been interest from the wider XML community and new requirements relating to its use within XML editors have also been proposed. There is now a W3C Community Group formed specifically for change tracking markup, and a standard in this area could have significant benefits for the XML community as a whole.

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XML and RDF Architectural Beastiary

Charles Greer (MarkLogic)

This paper presents some architectural patterns for leveraging XML documents and RDF graphs in enterprise database scenarios. Last year you heard about Chimeras. This year we’ll craft a few practical beasts that combine two of the web’s foundational technologies.

For the time being, document-oriented databases and those that store graphs are separate products; among them are, on the one hand XML databases, and on the other RDF triple stores. As we continue to refine what it means to serve data within post-relational enterprises, we’ll find that the XML and RDF
communities together understand the underpinnings of a tremendous variety of opportunities as yet unrealized. This paper helps enumerate architectures in which the use of RDF graphs and XML documents intersect.

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An XML Solution for Legal Documents

George Bina (Syncro Soft / oXygen XML Editor)

All companies deal with legal documents. They are generally maintained in unstructured formats that do not allow reuse while most of these legal documents share common parts that should stay the same in all documents. We discovered that we have many end user license agreements,with very similar content and keeping them synchronized and making sure everything is up to date quickly become a challenge. This presentation shows the XML based solution we adopted to solve this problem that allows us to write once and publish in every place we need that information to be. Then we extended this to cover also the SDK agreement as well as our reseller agreements.

George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor. He has more than 12 years experience in working with XML and related technologies including XML related projects, oXygen XML Editor and participation in open source projects, the most notable being DITA-NG – a Relax NG implementation of DITA – and oNVDL – an open source implementation of the NVDL standard, project that is now merged into Jing.

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XProc at the heart of an ebook production framework

Romain Deltour (DAISY)

Using XProc, the XML Pipeline Language, is the natural choice when implementing XML-centric single source ebook production workflows. With proper extensions and by encapsulating it in a component model, XProc can lie at the heart of a truly modular and extensible conversion framework. This paper describes the approach and lessons learned in the DAISY Pipeline project, an open source conversion platform for the production of accessible digital content.

Romain Deltour has been a professional software developer specialized in XML technologies for more than 8 years. After having worked two years at INRIA (the French national institute for research in computer science and control) in the Web Adaptation and Multimedia team, where he contributed to authoring tools for W3C SMIL documents, Romain joined the DAISY Consortium in 2006 as a contracted freelance software developer. He is notably the technical lead of the DAISY Pipeline project – an open source framework for the automated production of accessible materials, based on XProc and XSLT, contributed to the latest DAISY accessibility standards (DAISY/NISO Z39.98) and is also an active member of IDPF’s EPUB 3.0 working group.

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XQuery Development in the Cloud(9)

William Candillon (28msec)

XQuery is a double-edged sword: On one side, it enables building extremely powerful data-intensive applications. On the other side, the entry-barrier to the technology is extremely high. This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the development tooling. Tools need to have a deep semantic knowledge of the language while still being widely accessible. Our goal is to contribute a new XQuery development toolkit that is entirely browser-based and heavily relies on static code analysis in order to provide a rich editing experience.

William Candillon is a software engineer and developer advocate at 28msec. His goal is to empower developers to build large scale applications using XQuery. William is also vice president of the FLWOR foundation, a non-profit organization that supports the development of open source software based on XML and JSON technologies.

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XQuery meets SQL

Rodolfo Ochoa (Oracle) and Luis Rodriguez (Oracle)

This paper is intended to illustrate the way that SQL modules work with XQuery in order to provide the ability to query data from a SQL database and insert data to a SQL database. This storage is, at the time of creation of this paper, either SQLite or JDBC. These modules let the user, for example, execute a query, analyze the data, modify it and then send back the results to be stored again in the database.

All the input/output for these modules is managed in JSON format using the JSONiq specification. JSONiq is a small and simple set of extensions to XQuery, allowing XQuery processors to work with JSON and XML natively and to convert data between both formats. JSONiq is implemented in the Zorba XQuery Processor, giving it the option to use pure JSON, pure XML, or both depending on the application’s needs.

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