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:
- Author/Editor an SGML-specific editor available on many
platforms, but with limited formatting capabilities.
- Grif Editor a more expensive SGML-specific editor
requiring more powerful workstations, but with much more extensive
formatting capabilities (including Maths and complex tables).
A note of caution: Grif is a relatively new SGML product, although
it has been in use in non-SGML mode for some years, and has little
use outside of Europe.
- FastTAG an autotagging tool that is particularly
useful for the tagging of information and structures taken from
scanned documents (`legacy data'). Tools of this nature will be
required if and when it is decided to digitise many of the older
publications in University Libraries.
- Balise a generalised document transformation tool
which will greatly assist with the transformation of documents held
in the multiplicity of word-processor formats (not just Word and WordPerfect)
into a form suitable for inclusion in the digital libraries of the future.
- sgmls the most important product of all
a high quality `parser' which will be required by developers
of all specialised SGML-aware applications throughout academia.
We are very fortunate that this product is in the public domain.
[Note: Copies are available on the Exeter ftp server.]
- MarkMinder many would consider inclusion
of this product in the set of `key' products as strange
its use has so far been very limited, however it is the first
product to the market place supporting the use of HyTime,
the ISO standard for hypermedia and time-based documents.
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').
-
Document Management Systems: There are an increasing number
of document management and retrieval systems appearing,
all aimed at large collections of electronic documents.
It is, at this time, not possible to make a judgement,
BUT, it will be necessary as part of the move into
electronic libraries to investigate in depth these products.
Some would seem to be ideally suited to the University model
of Pcs and Macintoshes as user workstations with Unix systems
located centrally.
- Browsers/viewers: Associated with document management
systems will be the requirement for browsers. The sudden growth
of the World Wide Web has highlighted, among other things,
the greatly improved `readability' of documents that are
(a) not pre-formatted for display, but formatted on the fly
(one of the key advantages of distributing documents in SGML),
and (b) able to be indexed, and searched taking account of
structural information (another key advantage of SGML).
Currently, there are two classes of viewer: those aimed
at simple WWW documents with their ability to link across the
Internet via suitable tags in each document, but with limited
handling of complex documents; and those aimed at reading documents
marked in accordance with many different, and often complex,
document structures but without the hyperlinking between distributed
document stores. Browsers capable of providing both sets of functionality
will be required in due course users will not want to switch
viewers between using the Web and using their University's electronic library.
This may be a suitable area for UK development; however, adaption
and development of existing commercial and public domain products
by their authors may be a more cost-effective solution.
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'.