Zzzoot

I have just this morning released chidley , a code generator that reads XML and generates a Go program that can convert the given XML into JSON. Please see the github site for more details. I will be doing a series of chidley examples in this blog over the coming weeks.

The W3C has today announced Service Modeling Language 1.1 and SML Interchange Format 1.1 (SML-IF) , two XMl-based standards: SML, SML-IF Enable Validation of Sets of XML Documents To illustrate what SML adds to the XML ecosystem, consider what happens when someone purchases an airline ticket. Suppose the reservation information is stored as an XML document that includes passenger information. The reservation also refers to a second XML document that stores departure time and other information about the flight. One department manages customer information, another manages flight information. Before any transaction with the customer, the airline wants to ensure that the system as a whole is valid. SML allows the airline to verify that certain constraints are satisfied across the reservation and flight data. This makes it easier to manage inconsistencies, and to do so without writing custom code. As a result, the airline lowers the cost of managing tasks such as informing passengers when...

As heard at code4lib2009: " Let's say all of these Elvis impersonators are XML documents... " - Mark A. Matienzo, New Your Public Library

Related to my last posting ( FREE THE ARTICLES! (full-text for researchers & scientists and their machines) ) and in the light of Peter Murray-Rust's recent annoying discovery that he cannot text-mine Pubmed Central ( Can I data- and Text-mine Pubmed Central? ), I would like to suggest an additional criterion to the definition of Open Access: Open Access must include access by machines : At minimum one must allow crawls of the site/content or (to reduce the impact of badly configured crawlers) create a compressed XML file containing all metadata and either content, or direct links to content and make it available for download (and if bandwidth is still an issue put it on a P2P network like BitTorrent ). Preferable is to offer some kind of API (OTMI) or protocol (OAI-PMH) to get at content and metadata and citations. Better is to offer access to the XML of the articles in addition to the PDF and/or HTML; if the XML actually has some semantic content, then we are approaching th...

February 10 2008 marks the 10th anniversary of the release of XML 1.0 by the W3C (although some celebrate Nov 14 1996, the release date of the working draft while others celebrate the anniversary, August 1996, of the conference at which it was first discussed: hey, it's the Web: let a thousand flowers bloom!). XML has had an incredibly wide and deep impact across industry, science, technology: it is ubiquitous. As a technology it has disrupted the database community and industry, the publishing community and others. Many data standards groups in the sciences and in industry -- which previously spent their time developing byzantine formats for their particular information needs -- now spend their efforts on developing XML-based byzantine formats for their particular information needs. There are few science, arts, social science or humanities disciplines and industry sectors that do not have one or more Foo ML- specialized XML dialects for their needs, such as: Chemical Markup...

The W3C has published an early draft of the new HTML5 ( press release ). I have mixed feelings about this, but it is clear that to many that this is needed. There are still some major issues identified in the document in red. Hopefully HTML can move forward although some of the issues look like they may be hard to resolve. Browser wars again?? I hope not... Also released today: HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 digg story

The W3C has just released three SPARQL -related proposed recommendations: SPARQL Query Language for RDF SPARQL Query Results XML Format SPARQL Protocol for RDF