TECFA's XML Applications Page

This page is about available DTDs, Contents, etc. Mostly in relation with my intersts. Updated whenever I feel so

XML Contents @ TECFA

Teaching XML @ TECFA

• Check the TIE slides (XML sections)
• Some Contents are now made available client-side, e.g. student portfolios starting promotion Jolan (2003)
• Here is a list of simple examples for our STAF students: Stepbystep, Recit. Also check students staf14/ex2 starting Jolan where students have to write their own DTDs.
• In some courses, students use XML Markup for project definitions, see Vivian's ePBL and (older) EVA_pm projects.

General stuff

Indexes for DTDs and other grammars

• XML Catalog at xml.org. (Note: This has been reorganized into several subdomains, e.g. defense, e-gov, finances, etc...)
• Schema.net (DEAD ??)
• xmlns.com is an internet domain created for the purposes of simple Web namespace management. [2/2004]
• XML Schema and Soap ressources.
• The XML Familiy of Specifications: The Big Picture by Kenneth B. Small. ((old version)

General articles about schemas

• The Politics of Schemas: Part 1 and part 2by Kendall Grant Clark. Good reading !
• OASIS Catalog files: Entity Management and Standard Deviations from Norm . For those who wonder about public Identifiers :)

Text Processing

• A Decade of DTDs and SGML in Scholarly Publishing by Bruce Rosenblum and Irina Golfman, Proceedings of Extreme Markup Languages 2002
• The Future of Internet Publishing by Norbert H. Mikula
• XML-basierte elektronische Publikationen in Universitätsbibliotheken - eine Frage von Dokumenttypdefinitionen? Good article on electronic publications
• Workshop "DTDs and the usage of new XML-technologies for electronic theses and dissertations" DTD-Material Documents and DTDs presented in a workshop, Berlin 2000. Very interesting to people into academic texts !
• Cheshire II Project, A Next-Generation Online Catalog and Full-Text Information Retrieval System, Berkeley Project supporting Z39.50, SGML and XML. (not tested here)

Open Document Format

• OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC
• Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn't) (sept/2005 - article describing the Open Document standard).
• Docvert is web service software takes multiple word processor files (typically .doc) and converts them to Oasis OpenDocument.

TEI - Text Encoding Initiative

• TEI home at Oxford (TEI lite, including tools
• Official TIE Home Page
• Text Encoding for Interchange: a new Consortium (good overview article)
• Editing TEI documents using Framemaker+SGML (year ???)

DocBook

• DocBook (XML Version). Docbook is one of the most popular DTD's for writing books and papers (designed for informatics but used by other authors). There also is a simple version and a slidesdoctpye made by N.Walsh (fully compatible)
• http://docbook.sourceforge.net/ Docbook Open repository. Has several interesting stylesheets (including the known ones from N.Walsh)
• Writing Documentation Using DocBook Crash Course for using the KDE DocBook Tools. The tools themselves are at redhat.
• See e.g. XML Matters article by David Mertz for getting started with docbook.
• DocBook: The Definitive Guide ON-LINE O'Reilly book, nice on paper too.
• RefDB, RefDB is a reference database and bibliography tool for DocBook SGML/XML documents. It allows users to share databases over a network. Finally something like this is emerging :) 6/2001
• Profiling DocBook documents article by Jirka Kosek
• DocBook Wiki, founded by N. Walsh
• JReferences, is a tool to store and retrieve bibliographic references from a file or MySQL database. It reads BibTeXML, DocBook XML and RIS type references, and can output these and BibTex. A bibtex like alternative is also provided for DocBook. See BibTexML for details about the BibTexML standard and other tools

DITA

• Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA XML) Cover page article
• DITA - XML-based Darwin Information Typing Architecture FAQ
• Introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture
• Specialization in the Darwin Information Typing Architecture
• Specializing domains in Dita
• Darwin Information Typing Architecture Page at Cover Pages, i.e. a long commented list of resources. (updated 3/2004).
• DITA Open Toolkit 1.1: A Reference Implementation for OASIS DITA 1.0. The DITA Open Toolkit application transforms XML-based DITA content (maps and topics) into deliverable formats including XHTML, Eclipse Help, HTML Help, and JavaHelp.

Others

• IBTWSH. John Cowans, Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Simple Hypertext DTD, subset of XHTML Basic. We use this A LOT to spice up our various little grammars
• IEEE DTD (for writing documents, a simpler DTD than DocBook, works fine with FrameMaker/SGML
• Eprints.org has software for self-archiving (good stuff!). See also the Open Archives Initiative
• The tbook system for XML Authoring Latex-like DTD that translates to XHTML, PDF, Postscript, FrameMaker, RTF,

Other Schemas

Simple Text-centric DTDs

• Here is a list of simple examples for our STAF-14 students for exercice 1: Stepbystep, Recit. They can use it to do a CSS exercice in Staf-14. RSS 0.91 is also a good choice (although it's not text-centric).
• Also check our student's work portolios for staf14 / ex2 (starting Jolan) where students have to write their own DTDs.

Content Syndication (RSS)

• RSS Version Comparison
• RSS - Introduction to XML Really Simple Syndication XMLFiles.com resources.
• RSS 0.91. Until recently the most popular version. Created long time ago by Netscape ....
• RSS 2.0 Specification (at Harward Law). RSS 2.0 builds on the basic spec for RSS 0.91 (June 2000) and includes new features introduced in RSS 0.92 (December 2000) and RSS 0.94 (August 2002).
• RSS 1.0 is based on RDF. More complex than the RSS 0.9x and RSS 2x family. Less popular.

Semantic Web and Related

• Mind Swap home page, articles and tools for the semantic web and rdf
• Topic Maps with its XML Topic Maps (XTM). MANY more links in staf-18.
• RuleML , a shared Rule Markup Language (RuleML), permitting both forward (bottom-up) and backward (top-down) rules in XML for deduction, rewriting, and further inferential-transformational tasks. (in progress)
• Ontology Markup Language and Conceptual Markup Language Hello AI again :)
• RDFWeb - Friend of a Friend developer site for the FOAF project. See the FOAF Vocabulary Specification. The FOAF Wiki has interesting information, e.g. how to create a FOAF document. A simple tool to create a FOAF page is Foaf-a-matic
• RELATIONSHIP vocabulary for describing relationships between people. See also FOAF above
• TRIPLE a RDF query, inference, and transformation language for the Semantic Web
• Requirements for a Web Ontology Language W3C working draft march 2002
• Agent Markup Language (DAML) Program (home page, also for DAML-ONT and OIL). Language and tools to facilitate the concept of the semantic web.
• Gourmet Recipe Manager is a simple but powerful recipe-managing application. Gourmet is intended for the GNOME desktop environment, but works on any platform that gtk supports, including windows. Interesting, so its software that makes use of xml-encoded contents distributed over the web (10/2005). Something like this would be good for lesson plans :)

Vocabularies for special contents

• Legal XML @ Oasis
• Human Resource Management Markup Language (HRMML) from Structured Methods Inc.
• QAML, a markup language for internet FAQs. in particular QUAML English Home Page
• XBELThe XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL) (A Python XML SIG project).
• The International Press Telecommunications Council endorses several formats, e.g. News Industry Text format (NITF), NewsML, SportsML, ProgramGuideML, EventsML, etc. See also the NewsML Toolkit
• The Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Protocol (W3C Note). See also this
• iCalendar has an XML variant
• flixml.org, Home of the XML b-Movie guide. Includes a Tutorial on how to understand/ use the DTD.
• AIML Markup Language for Chatter Bots (also: The Alice Connection))
• BiblioML An XML application for bibliographic records, based on the Unimarc ibliographic Format (english/français). There is also MARC DTDs (MAchine Readable Cataloging Document Type Definition).
  You can also look at TEI's work and NLM Standard Publisher Data Format, e.g. the PubMed DTD. Both are SGML but they can help.

Workflow

• Simple Workflow Access Protocol (SWAP). Seems to be a dead project now.
• The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) defines a series of standards like Wf-XML (as extension of AWSP)
• PIF - XML Process Interchange Format

Programming

• See also: XSLT, SVG, etc. I.e. all the W3C standards for interactive contents and its manipulation
• UIMLUser interface markup language. Describing graphic user interfaces in a way that is independant of peripherals. see also: Mozilla's XPT

XML in education

IMS/Scorm framework and friends

• The IMS global learning consortium has specifications (including XML bindings) for their meta data, content packaging, some contet (e.g. simple sequencing), some interactivity (e.g. quizzes), student data, etc. Various implementations for various "standards" now exist. The only standard of pedagogical interest, i.e. learning design is not implemented yet.
• If you are interested in Metada (I am not), read What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the Learning Object Metadata Standard? by Carol Jean Godby. Give a good overview on LOM profiles (usage) 11/2004.
• Learning Design at LEarning Networks. This is a more useful site for LD than IMS. (see the forums
• ADLNet (Advanced Distributed Learning Network a US DoD/OSTP initiative. Look for SCORN (site has stupid frames), i.e. the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model, specs and sample code and documentation available. (Not really tested, certainly worth a look !)
• IEEE has a Learning Technology Standards Committee (P1484) with a lot of working groups. Most of their output are Word Documents (!) when I last looked. Note that there is also an ISO group (what do they do ??).

Educational Markup languages

• eduML and eduMLEducation Markup Language
• SEUL/Edu (Where is the XML here, I forgot ?)
• Object Oriented Education article by J. Erb
• Tutorial Modelling Language (was Tutorial Markup Language when it was a superset of HTML) and both seem to be dead ...
• Learning Material Markup Language (LMML). This is based on the Passau Teachware Model that describes generally the modular structure of eLearning contents. This project seems to be alive (10/2004).

Media frameworks other than RLOs

• MEDIT, Multimedia Environment for Interactive Distant Teaching is a Media Group/EPFL Project.

Other

• Learning Objects Good article by Stephen Downes that mentions XML a lot
• Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) (Oasis Cover Page) , www.sifinfo.org/
• Uses of XML in Distance and Distributed Learning a Talk by Geoffrey C. Fox
• 2-3 talks in the European workshop Semantic Web Technologies (nov 2000)
• ULF - Universal Learning Format by Saba Software Inc. See also Universal Learning Format Technical Specification @ XML Cover
• XML Forum for Education (works on electronic transactions for the higher education industry .... see more info on this XML Cover pages
• Learning Objcts: Standards Efforts, Articles, and Vendors INDEX by Michael Smith
• Yolaine Bourda wrote several articles on metadata and XML (most in french).
• Logidée has a toolkit (documentation in French) for writing educational materials
• Survey of Educational Modelling Languages See also: Educational Modelling Languages
• Educational Modelling Language, in particular Articles on Educational Modelling Language
• Learning Objects page at Univ of Wisconsin's Center for Internatl. Education (good index !)
• Instruction Architect Online learning objects creation (could be XML, but is probably not)