Structural Metadata and the Social Limitation of Interoperability: A Sociotechnical View of XML and Digital Library Standards Development
(source: Balisage: The Markup Conference, août 08)

"Ten years after its endorsement by the World Wide Web Consortium, XML has achieved a high degree of adoption within numerous, disparate communities and in a vast range of application domains, from standards for electronic filing of federal income tax (Internal Revenue Service, 2007) to user interface design (Goodger et al., 2001). The digital library community has been an active and early adopter of XML, for use in structuring both content and metadata. The reasons for this rapid uptake of XML within the digital library community are familiar to anyone with experience in the world of markup languages:
- XML helps ensure platform (and perhaps more critically vendor) independence;
- XML provides the multilingual character support critical to the handling of library materials;
- XML's extensibility and modularity allow libraries to customize its application within their own operating environments;
- XML helps minimize software development costs by allowing libraries to leverage existing, open source development tools;
- XML, through virtue of being an open standard which enables descriptive markup, may assist in the long-term preservation of electronic materials; and perhaps most importantly
- XML provides a technological basis for interoperability of both content and metadata across library systems.
For all of these reasons, XML-based content standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) have seen wide adoption within the library community, and librarians have been actively engaged in the development of a number of XML-based metadata standards, including Encoded Archival Description (EAD), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS), Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), Metadata for Images in XML (MIX), MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL), Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) and many others. XML is now widely used throughout the research library world, and is a fundamental part of the infrastructure developed within the digital library community over the past decade."

... voici un message de E. L. Morgan:

"I have posted a MARCXML stylesheet that budding XSLT hackers may want to peruse. [1]

The heart of stylesheet reads all the leader, control, and data fields from the MARCXML input and displays them as tagged MARC in a Web browser using a rudimentary Javascript show/hide function. The whole thing supposes the input is coming from a Zebra-based SRU server, but the XSLT could easily be repurposed. Not rocket science, just useful. For more details see the blog posting. [2]"

[1] MARCXML stylesheet - http://tinyurl.com/6cvok4
[2] blog posting - http://infomotions.com/blog/2008/09/mbooks-revisited/

XML in libraries: A workshop

Au menu:
Beyond MARC
Writing XML
Making XML findable
Full-text indexes
OAI service provider
OAI data repository
Mash-ups

Par Eric Lease Morgan (màj de mai 08).

Via Antoinette (liste XML4Lib)

Alex Iskold, The Structured Web - A Primer (Read/Write Web):

"Among the evolving aspects of the new web are Semantics, Attention (Implicit Behavior) and Personalization. Regardless of what we are decide to call this next web, the information in it is going to be more meaningful, more automatic, and more tailored to each of us.

A critical piece of the next web evolution is the introduction of structured information. This concept is so basic to us as humans, that we completely overlook the fact that it is quite foreign to computers. When a person looks at a book on Amazon, she sees a book, with the author, ISBN number, publisher and the publication date. To a computer that page on Amazon is nothing more than a bunch of HTML. Increasingly, information on the web is becoming more and more structured. This process is happening via several major movements:

* The rise of APIs
* The proliferation of vertical applications that run on top of existing data
* An increase in classic Semantic Technologies and Microformats
* The spread of RSS as an information delivery mechanism

In this post we'll look at how these movements collectively help power a more structured web."

W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) to Proposed Recommendation. With these attributes, semantic annotations can be added to Web Services Description Language (WSDL) components for use in classifying, discovering, matching, composing, and invoking Web services.

Via Planet RDF

"A new version of the RDFa Primer has been published by the W3C RDFa Task Force. RDFa allows authors to extend their XHTML pages with any kind of RDF data, using some extra XHTML attributes or reusing existing ones. This document will be accompanied soon by a detailed syntax definition and the specification of an XHTML1.1 module."

Via Planet RDF

Les proceedings de PLAN-X 2007, Programming Language Technologies for XML, An ACM SIGPLAN Workshop colocated with POPL 2007, Nice, France — January 20, 2007 sont disponibles ici.

Via Planet RDF

Le W3C a adopté aujourd'hui les recommandations orientées XML suivantes:

XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM)
XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators
XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0
XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language
XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics
XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0 (XQueryX)
XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization
XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0

Via Planet RDF

Via Les petites cases de Got: "All markup ends up looking like XML" (les formats en question: XML, JSON et LISP S-expression)

A lire à propos de Relax NG, XML Schema, Mars (PDF) et plus sur Les petites cases de Got.