Sessions

One of the significant limitations of existing XSLT processors is the need to allocate enough memory to hold the entire source document. However cheap memory becomes, there will always be some XML documents that are too large to hold in memory; and even where the memory is available, streamed transformations should be able to run with lower latency and higher throughput.

Since XSLT 2.0 was delivered early in 2007, the XSL Working Group has been focusing its efforts on developing a version of the language for which streamed execution is possible. This involves both identifying characteristics of a stylesheet that make streaming difficult or impossible, so that users can avoid such features, and the addition of new language constructs to take their place. The resulting language design has been strongly influenced by collection of a representative selection of use cases; and although the design is very different from the pioneering STX (streaming transformations for XML) specification, it benefits from the experience of the STX designers and implementers in determining what is and is not streamable.

This talk will be the first public presentation on XSLT 2.1 by the editor of the specification.

Michael Kay

The speaker, Dr Michael Kay, is founder of Saxonica Limited which develops the popular Saxon XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema engine. He is a member of the W3C working groups for all three languages, and author of XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference, the definitive Wrox guide to the language, recently republished in a fourth edition.

The block diagram for XSL 1.0 and XSL 1.1 was fairly straightforward: source XML transformed to FO markup then creating pages. The official block diagram for XSL 2.0 doesn't yet exist, but indications are that it will be closer to an octopus than to the arrowed straight line of the currents diagram.

The requirements for XSL 2.0 includes features such as animations, feedback from the pagination stage, formatting of document collections, variable-sized regions, and positioning objects relative to each other.

A recitation of the features selected for XSL 2.0 may roll over you with the occasional spark of interest for some of the features, but an implementer has to consider the full gamut of features when designing a formatter -- irrespective of whether the features will be in the first releases, they all still have to be considered. This paper discusses the changes that will have to take place under the hood of any XSL formatter that supports XSL 2.0 and what those additional capabilities can bring to your stylesheets.

Tony Graham

Tony Graham has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSL/XSLT since 1998.

Tony is an invited expert on the W3C XSL FO subgroup and a previous member of the W3C XML Protocol WG. He is the author of Unicode: A Primer and the developer of the xmlroff XSL Formatter. He is a member of the XML Guild.

Tony is interested in applying the tools for ensuring software quality — unit testing, code coverage, profiling, and other tools — to XML and XSL/XSLT processes.

While XML is an enabling technology for efficient, granular reuse of information, using angle brackets alone won't get the whole job done. In addition to markup, authors need tools and technologies for finding, extracting, and dynamically assembling new documents from reusable parts.

Dynamic assembly, in this context, refers to the ability to pull together a collection of resources and compose them into a new document which can then be further transformed into any number of presentations: a web site, an online help system, an eBook, or even a traditional, printed book format.

This paper examines ongoing work to provide facilities in DocBook for dynamic assembly. That work includes the DocBook Technical Committee's progress in defining a declarative specification for dynamically assembled documents as well as the author's work to materialize such assemblies using modern XML technologies like XSLT and XProc.

Norman Walsh

Norman Walsh is a Principal Technologist in the Information & Media Solutions team at Mark Logic Corporation. He is also an active participant in a number of standards efforts worldwide. Mr. Walsh is an elected member of the Technical Architecture Group at the W3C where he is also chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group, co-chair of the XML Core Working Group, and an active member of the XSL Working Group. At OASIS, he is chair of the DocBook Technical Committee and a member of the RELAX NG and Entity Resolution Technical Committees. He was editor of the XML Catalogs specification for the Entity Resolution Technical Committee and wrote the implementation of that OASIS Standard that is part of the XML Commons project at Apache. He was a specification lead for the Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) and has participated occasionally in other XML-related JSRs.

Before joining Mark Logic, he was a XML Standards Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc. With more than a decade of industry experience, Mr. Walsh is well known for his work on DocBook and for the numerous papers and presentations he has published. He is the principle author of DocBook: The Definitive Guide.

EXPath is a project to define portable extensions to core XML technologies. The main means to doing so is the specification of libraries of XPath functions, usable within any XPath expressions evaluator, including XSLT, XQuery and XProc. But EXPath is also open to other kinds of specifications, like the Packaging System and the framework to write Web Applications, both described in this paper.

EXPath - EXPath Resources

Florent Georges

Florent Georges is a freelance IT consultant in Brussels who has been involved in the XML world for 10 years, especially within the XSLT and XQuery communities. His main interests are in the field of XSLT and XQuery extensions and libraries, packaging, unit and functional testing, and portability between several processors. Since the beginning of 2009, he has worked on EXPath, to define "standard" tools and extension function libraries that can be used in XPath (so in XSLT, XQuery and XProc as well).

For "enterprise" or other large XML schema sets, managing the changes between releases is of major importance. Normal XML differencing tools can be applied to many XML schemas, like W3C XML Schemas, but these do not give users an indication of the complete ("full") impact of a change. A change to a W3C XML Schema might be to only a single location in that Schema, but the knock-on effect of that change might affect thousands of locations. It is important to be able to report the "full impact" of any schema changes to users. This presentation discusses how XML schema differences can be calculated using an "extended XPath" approach, and will demonstrate some software for calculating these differences.

Anthony B. Coates

Anthony B. Coates (Tony) is Director and CTO of Londata Limited, a UK IT consultancy that specialises in financial XML and data modelling. Tony has been an active participant in numerous financial and non-financial XML standards, including ISO 20022, FpML, MDDL, UBL, and genericode. Tony is also a member of the XML Guild.

Daniel Dui

Daniel is an independent consultant based in London, where he advises corporate clients in the financial services industry on data architecture, XML technologies, and business analysis. He has been involved since 2001 in the definition of FpML (Financial product Markup Language), an industry standard for over-the-counter financial derivatives trading. He became interested in XML schema design and evolution as part of his PhD research work at UCL (University College London).

As XML editor vendor, we’re thoroughly familiar with the intricate details of tracking of changes in an XML lifecycle. In this session we will show how change tracking differs from comparing versions of a document. We will discuss the complex issues we have to deal with when change tracking is combined with structure and real time XML validation. Finally we will discuss the more exotic requirements that some our customers have.

Find how schema information can be used to improve the XML editing process. The presentation will cover techniques like content completion, automatic insertion of content, different strategies that can be applied for operations like delete, type, paste, drag and drop in trying to keep the document schema-valid and how schema information can be used for better XML formatting. Multiple schema languages will be analyzed both from a theoretical and a practical point of view.

George Bina

George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor. He has more than 10 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 oNVDL - an open source implementation of the NVDL standard, project that is now merged into Jing.

This paper describes the development of a specialized RELAX NG schema for XHTML and a related XSLT processing chain. This development is the XML-related outcome of a markup project. The non-XML-related outcome are two documents about Japanese layout, one in English, one in Japanese. The paper focuses on the interplay between markup constraints and social constraints, and demonstrates the virtue of hiding XML, for fostering its adoption in new communities.

Felix Sasaki

From 1993 until 1999, Felix studied Japanese and Linguistics in Berlin, Nagoya (Japan) and Tokyo. Since 1999 he worked in the Department of Computational Linguistics and Text-technology, at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), where he finished his PhD in 2004. The PhD deals with the integration of heterogeneous linguistic resources using XML-based (e.g.linguistic corpora) and RDF-based (e.g. lexical, conceptual models) representations. Felix joined the W3C staff in April 2005 to work in the areas of Internationalization, Web Services and Media Annotations. Since March 2009 he holds a Professor position at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany, in the area of libraries, archives and documentation.

This article presents a framework for editing, publishing and sharing XML content directly from within the browser. It comes in two parts: XTiger XML and AXEL. XTiger XML is a document template specification language for creating document models. AXEL is a client-side Javascript library that turns the document template into a document editing application running in the browser. This framework is targeted at non XML speaking end users, since it preserves end users from XML syntax during editing. Its current implementation proposes a pseudo-WYSIWYG user interface where the document template provides a document-oriented editing metaphor, or a more form-oriented metaphor, depending on the template.

XTiger XML and AXEL Home

Sharon will explore the various aspects of markup strategies that have evolved over the years and why they have "staying" power. What is the purpose? What has been achieved? Have we taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way or is this all part of the "Grand Scheme"? These and other ideas will be considered as we ponder the future of XML.

Sharon C. Adler

Sharon Adler was a Senior Manager at IBM Research in New York specializing in XML standards, Web Services, and other areas for the past eleven years. She recently relinquished her management role to a long-time colleague so she focus her efforts on technical work. Before rejoining IBM in 1999, she was a Director of Product Management for Publishing Tools for Inso Corporation in Providence, Rhode. From 1985-1992, Sharon held key positions with IBM where she led the development of standards-based authoring and document management tools. Sharon has been instrumental in the development of International computer standards for more than 30 years. She served as Vice Chair /Editor of multiple ANSI/ISO standards committees as well as her position as Chair of the XSLT Working Group from the W3C she has held since its inception in 1997.

As storage - main memory as well as disk - becomes cheaper, the amount of available information is increasing and it is a challenge to organize it. Our broader aim is to provide a unified framework for efficiently versioning and querying data, documents, as well as any kind of semi-structured information between data and documents, which can be stored as XML. In order to query this information, we started with the XQuery programming language, and extended its data model, its syntax and its processing model to make it seamlessly time-aware. More specifically, to do this, we made the assumption that the changes made by an XQuery program can always be expressed as a PUL. This is not obvious with an XQuery Scripting Extension program, as it can apply several, possibly interdependent, PULs. The contribution of this paper is to introduce a new operation on pending update lists, called PUL composition, which allows to summarize the changes made by an entire XQuery Scripting program with a single PUL instead of a sequence of PULs.

Since the invention of the Web, the browser has become more and more powerful. By now, it is a programming and execution environment in itself. The predominant language to program applications in the browser today is JavaScript. With browsers becoming more powerful, JavaScript has been extended and new layers have been added (e.g., DOM-Support and XPath). Today, JavaScript is very successful and applications and GUI features implemented in the browser have become increasingly complex. We aim at improving the programmability of Web browsers by enabling the execution of XQuery programs in the browser. Although it has the potential to ideally replace JavaScript, it is possible to run it in addition to JavaScript for more flexibility. Furthermore, it allows instant code migration from the server to the client and vice-versa. This enables a significant simplification of the technology stack. The intuition is that programming the browser involves mostly XML (i.e., DOM) navigation and manipulation, and the XQuery family of W3C standards were designed exactly for that purpose. We developed an extension to XQuery for Web browsers and implemented it as a plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Plugins for Chrome, Safari and Opera are on their way. The purpose of our contribution is to give a demo showing the usefulness and simplicity of XQuery for the development of AJAX-style applications.

Additional info: http://www.xqib.org

In its history, Topic Maps developed from a syntax-based standard to a pure data model without any syntax defined within its core data model. The syntaxes defined by the ISO for the exchange of Topic Maps are conforming to the generic data model, one of them, XTM, being based on XML. The usage of XTM without a Topic Maps engine is cumbersome because of the generalized schema and the merging rules. For example, extracting useful information from XTM using XSLT requires to query for the typing topics, which is a new subquery just for selecting the right subject whereas it was the entity name in a domain specific XML format. Querying the properties, called Names and Occurrences in Topic Maps, requires additional subqueries because their types and scopes are again Topics and not simple XML entity- and attribute names. The Topic Maps Query Language which is the latest draft in the ISO standardization presented here allows formulating queries against a Topic Maps store in a concise way and outputting the result in various representations. Our implementation TMQL4J uses any TMAPI-compatible store to operate on and allows optimized queries and outputting domain-specific XML. This is demonstrated by generating an ATOM feed for the subject identity record service subj3ct.com.

Try it -  Code in Java, APL 2.0 -  Documentation -  Adapter for JRuby -  JRuby Homepage

Benjamin Bock

Benjamin started creating the first Topic Maps engine for Ruby in 2006 to unite rapid web application development with Ruby on Rails and the flexibility of Topic Maps data models. In 2008 he was founding member of the Topic Maps Lab where he now leads the Semantic Integration group. As an expert invited by the ISO he represents Germany in the further development of the Topic Maps international industry standards family.

Sven Krosse

Sven started his studies at the university of cooperative education of Leipzig and passed with a diploma at 2007. In the following two years, he studied at the university of Leipzig and finished in October 2009 with a master of science. During his studies he work as a freelancer and a research assistant at the university of Leipzig.

Since May 2009, Sven is a member of the topic maps lab and is working on the TMQL implementation. He is the project leader and main developer of the Java-based TMQL engine TMQL4J and implements different tools and programs to work with topic maps, like a CTMWriter based on TMAPIx.

Lutz Maicher

Lutz jumped into Topic Maps in 2002 as researcher at the University of Leipzig. After his doctoral thesis in the same field he established a research group only dedicated to Topic Maps. Today he leads the Topic Maps Lab which is an exciting crowd of Topic Maps enthusiasts.

The standard XQuery language lacks the ability to define and manipulate persistent artifacts like collections, indexes, and integrity constraints. This paper introduces a first attempt to standardize the syntax and semantics of such extensions, and it studies the implications on the static context, dynamic context and processing model of XQuery while dealing with persistent data. The paper presents example modules that show how collections, indexes, and integrity constraints are declared, created, maintained, or accessed.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the specification for the Extensible Markup Language (XML, not an acronym) in 1998; since then, W3C has produced a wide range of specifications central to XML, including namespaces, xml:id, XLink, XPath, XPointer, Schema, XSLT, XSL-FO, XQuery, and, more recently, SML, XProc, EXI and more. Several pieces of work are coming to a close in 2010. In the future, should the XML Activity at W3C grow again, or shrink? What work should we be doing that we are not? (and what should we not be doing that we are?)

The session will explore work that W3C could consider in the future, and will ask the audience to participate with comments and suggestions. It should be understood that W3C is funded by Membership fees, so that the work we can do is limited to what Members (both existing and future) might support, but, within that framework, there is a lot of flexibility.

Several other standards organizations and industry consortia have produced specifications relating to XML; some (such as ISO) may also have endorsed one or more W3C specifications. Should W3C endorse the use of some other specifications alongside our own? What relationship would the conference attendees like to see between W3C and ISO or OASIS, for example, or the XML Consortium in Japan?

All-XML paradigms such as XRX offer significant advantages over more conventional approaches to document management, but are not ideally suited to realtime applications. The paper explores an alternative all-XML approach based on small daemons with flexible mechanisms for connecting to each other and passing information. The approach is applied to a highly distributed live music system.

Mark Howe

Mark's programming career lurched from BBC BASIC and 6502 assembler to Symbolics Zetalisp before settling on Perl, XSLT and, most recently, Scala. He develops website solutions, specialising in content management system and social networking sites, and is the team leader of the Xcruciate project.

Mark has a keen interest in online churches such as Church of Fools. He is the author of Online Church: First steps towards virtual incarnation which describes St Pixels. The Xcruciate project started with issues encountered by Mark while writing the software for St Pixels.

Tony Graham

Tony Graham has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSL/XSLT since 1998.

Tony is an invited expert on the W3C XSL FO subgroup and a previous member of the W3C XML Protocol WG. He is the author of Unicode: A Primer and the developer of the xmlroff XSL Formatter. He is a member of the XML Guild.

Tony is interested in applying the tools for ensuring software quality – unit testing, code coverage, profiling, and other tools – to XML and XSL/XSLT processes. He wrote the C/LibXSLT implementation of Xacerbate.

Alan Hazelden

Alan is a freelance programmer with a particular interest in game development and physics simulation. A recent Computer Science graduate from Warwick University, he has worked on a range of projects, from CAD via object-oriented Perl to the Java/Saxon implementation of Xacerbate.

Hobbies include juggling, reading and mathematics.

Film Markup Language (FML) is a DTD and a processing model for automating commercial cinemas. This whitepaper outlines the principles behind cinema automation, breaking down the process into semantic components, and applies XML to put the principles into practice.

Ari Nordström

Ari Nordström is the resident XML guy at Condesign Operations Support 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 Nordström spends some of his spare time projecting films at the Draken Cinema in Göteborg, Sweden, which should explain why he wants to automate cinemas using XML.

This demo shows how two key technologies can be combined in order to provide a novel breed of scalable information processing systems and architectures: (a) XQuery and (b) Cloud Computing. Using examples, we show how several classes of applications can be supported well in this way.

The past couple of years have seen a drastic improvement of the web platform in its multimedia capabilities. From styled text with a few pictures, embedded objects, and limited interactivity we are now moving towards far greater integration of multiple media technologies resulting in a much richer platform being available. As multimedia XML reaches a level of maturity that makes it usable in the large, it is time to take a global look at what is available or becoming available today.

Robin Berjon

Robin has spent the better part of this decade setting standards for a large variety of XML and Web technologies within the W3C and other organisations. He has served as author or editor for more than dozen W3C standards, and chaired multiple groups working on XML optimisation and Web APIs. In addition to this, Robin has been an active participant in the Perl community releasing a number of open source projects around XML and Web publishing. In his copious spare time he reads, writes, and gets bitten by his cat.