Presentations Referencing SGML/XML in Electronic Publishing. Some Examples.
Extracts from some presentation abstracts for The Third ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing, May 10 - 12, 19999, Ronneby, Sweden.
Henning Lobin and Andreas Witt, Semantic Navigation in Electronic Encyclopedias - "In the field of electronic publishing, encyclopedias form a unique sort of texts for investigating advanced methods of navigation. The user of an electronic encyclopedia normally expects special methods for accessing the entries inside the encyclopedia database. The traditional navigation through printed encyclopedias focuses on the alphabetic order of the entries. Within electronic encyclopedias, thematic structuring of lemmas and, of course, extensive (hyper-)linking mechanisms have been added. In the paper, we want to show our developments, which go beyond these navigational structures. We have concentrated on the semantic space formed as the lemmas to build a network of semantic distances and thematic trails through the encyclopedia. . . After analyzing the encyclopedia, the resulting semantic distances are transformed into an SGML or (as far as possible) an XML data structure which serves as a basis for generating visualizations dynamically. These visualizations are networks that show a lemma surrounded by other lemmas in the near semantic environment connected by arcs."
Eric Hellman, The Scholarly Link Specification (SlinkS) Framework - "The Scholarly Link Specification (SlinkS) Framework is designed to facilitate direct inter-publisher internet reference linking by giving publishers a way to publish link method specifications. Although many impressive implementations of reference linking into databases have been reported, direct linking of references to other publishers' sites has been impractical. SLinkS aims to make direct linking practical by providing a well-defined syntax and vocabulary for the exchange of the necessary information. A publisher can then implement reference linking for a large number of publishers using a single software module. SLinkS has 2 components: 1. An XML based template language, with Document Type Definition, for constructing URL's and DOi's (Digital Object Identifiers) from bibliographic data. The language defines a large number of bibliographic place holders and a number of text transformations and look-up lists. 2. An RDF metadata vocabulary, with scheme, to express information, such as validity ranges, access restrictions, search resolution, and things needed to implement true cross-publisher linking."
Stefan Hermann, Prof. Dr. Anne Brüggemann-Klein, and Professor Derick Wood, Visually Specifying Context - "Over the last ten years we have been developing a system, called Designer, that supports a high-level approach to typesetting and screensetting, and also supports style rule and style sheet specification. More recently, we have focussed our attention on style-sheet specification primarily for graphics designers but also for other neophyte screensetters and typesetters. Since we expect such designers to be inexperienced computer users we decided to use a declarative approach to style-sheet specification. Traditional style-sheet specification in publishing houses is declarative; therefore, designers will be on familiar ground. Surely, they would find macro programming, procedural specification and attribute manipulation nontrivial. In our experience, almost all style rule difficulties are caused by contextual issues; therefore, we decided to separate the specification of context from the issue of style specification. One observation about this separation is in order: we need provide only a mechanism that tests whether a specific context of a given part of a document is present or not. Based on this observation, the style rules may now incorporate conditional statements or expressions to express context-dependent choices. Thus, we can isolate context determination from style-rule syntax to a large extent. The preliminary work on Designer did just that as we have reported elesewhere. Once we have isolated the specification of context from the more general specification of style sheets, we are able to provide inexperienced users with better support for this aspect of style specification. Indeed, it also frees us to consider different techniques (different from attribution, for example) for context specification. We introduce a simple and novel visual technique for the specification of context in structured documents, that we call T-graphs, that we base on what we call T-configurations in document trees. The technique is implemented in the current version of Designer. Although we are applying this technique in the specification of context-dependent style sheets for HTML, SGML and XML documents, it can also be used in other environments such as query specification for structured documents and for computer program transformations. We compare T-graphs with the context specification techniques found in other style-sheet systems and we also provide examples of context that we can and cannot specify with T-graphs. Although T-graphs are restrictive, they lend themselves to visual construction and modification, our main requirement when we designed this context-specification method. Context-dependent processing and specification are not new topics; they surface in almost all computing activities. What is somewhat surprising is that the issue of context as a topic in its own right does not appear to have been studied. (It has, however, been a topic of much interest in formal language theory; in particular, for variants of grammars.) In the Designer project, we expected to be able to use the traditional approach from the compiler and programming-languages community; namely, attribution. In addition, we also expected to be able to use and modify previous approaches to style specification such as suggested by the DSSSL standard for SGML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for HTML and XML, and Extensible Style Language (XSL) for XML."
Ann Apps, The SuperJournal Project: Data Handling Using SGML - "The SuperJournal research project studied factors which will make electronic journals useful and successful within the academic community. The three year project (1995-1998) developed an electronic journal application making available, via the World Wide Web to particular University test sites, 48 peer-reviewed academic journals, within four subject clusters, provided by major journal publishers (Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, Macmillan, et-al). Journal data delivery was either PDF full articles, with SGML metadata (header) information, or full text SGML, mostly with accompanying PDF. Reflecting each publisher's choice of SGML DTD, there were ten different article header DTDs and five different full article DTDs. The SuperJournal application required a common article header information format for data capture, the obvious choice being SGML. Thus a common DTD, the SuperJournal Header DTD, was defined."
Richard Gartner, The Internet Library of Early Journals : an Electronic Library of Primary Sources on the Internet - "A particularly innovative feature of this project is its treatment of metadata - the entire project uses SGML ("Standard Generalised Markup Language") as the basis of its bibliographic and full-text contents, and represents one of the first attempts to make such use of this language as the basis of a digitization project. SGML is an ISO-defined standard for text-encoding, and is therefore independent of any given software and readily interchangeable with other applications: it also provides a degree of simplicity for such complex information that is not readily achievable with more conventional database systems. This facet of the project has elicited considerable interest from similar projects world-wide."
Anneli Heimbürger, "A structured link document as a new means for composing and publishing technical customer documentation in extranets and intranets" - "The paper will be focused on how to compose and publish sets of technical documents based on the XLink language in inter- and intraorganisational environments, such as extranet and intranet. As an example, a customer documentation of a mill project will be studied. Characteristics of the XLink and XPointer languages, like extended, group, document and role -attributes and their use in composing sets of documents will be described. A model for a structured link document, which is the main component of the whole customer documentation, will be given."
Creagh Cole, "Australian Literature Full-Text Database." - "The Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS) at the University of Sydney was established in 1996. Since that time a number of electronic publication projects have been initiated. These projects consist of primary source texts, images and library finding aids encoded according to internationally accepted standards set down by the TEI, EBIND and EAD guidelines, and in this the site is unique in Australia. The largest of these projects is a digital library of Australian Literature, a collection which currently consists of 70 sgml-encoded texts and which is freely available at http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit. The Australian texts listed here [in SETIS] have been [SGML] encoded according to the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI-2) and are converted to HTML as users search or retrieve sections of the texts."
M. Carmen Fernández Panadero, Andrés Marín López, Carlos Delgado Kloos, Carlos García Rubio, Vicente Luque Centeno, Luis Sánchez Fernández, Arturo García Ares, "'Mass-customizing' your e-journal" - "In order to achieve a good selection process, published information should be well categorized and self-described with metadata. We have defined a rather simple XML application for news documents called Journalism Markup Language (JML) that allows, among other things, news articles to be structured and properly classified in a database, and searching processes to return refined results. Other benefits of using JML as a news markup language come from the application of XSL rules for transforming JML documents to different formats (HTML mainly and maybe MHEG in the future). . .Readers may specify their interests according to the metadata of the news articles. They might be interested in particular topics, authors or sections and they should also be able to specify dates, keywords or substrings. These interests may be used in the personalization and archive searching processes. We have defined another XML markup language called Journalism Preferences Markup Language (JPML) for describing readers' preference specifications."