SGML Report: Management Summary

This report has been produced by The <SGML> Project based on information and expertise that has been gained over three years of the project. It is being published jointly by UCSG and The <SGML> Project. The report describes about forty separate software products, plus many more `associated products' that are usually additional sub-systems to the major product. It provides assessments of many of those products — some are so specialised, or simply brand new, that providing an assessment has either been impractible or impossible. Unlike previous assessments undertaken by UCSG and its predecessors, any assessment of SGML-aware software will cover products aimed at all aspects of the market for handling, processing, storing and creating information rather than at a narrow specific task. This presents the problem that comparing `chalk and cheese' is of no value in itself, and the large collection of products has had to be sub-divided in some way. Making such a sub-division is in itself fraught with problems, as many products will not fit neatly into whatever divisions are made.

Although the report does not make any specific recommendations for academia- wide acquisition, it is clear that certain products command wide-spread respect throughout the SGML community, and depending upon the takeup of SGML within the acdemic community will need to be considered further. Those key products are:

There are two very significant areas of use of SGML-aware products within academia that have not been mentioned above: document management systems and viewers (sometimes termed `browsers'). Finally, this report can only be a snapshot of an area that is developing as we write — further public domain products arrived with the project recently and have been placed on the ftp server and information about them has been disseminated to the active SGML users in the community. Using the limited remaining funds of the project, three activities undertaken by the project will be continued by the University of Exeter for some time. These are maintenance of the distribution list at `mailbase.ac.uk', support for the anonymous ftp server which will be extended to include other topics, and continuing to answer SGML queries addressed to `sgml@exeter'.