Abstract: "A great deal of the collective knowledge of organizations is stored in documents. To be able to use documents effectively, the information structure in the documents should be carefully planned. International standards, for example SGML, have been developed for defining document structures. The definition method however is not enough. For defining effective document standards for an organization, a profound document analysis is needed. In the analysis, current documents and document management practices should be studied and described before developing new document structures and document management practices. The development of a methodology for document analysis is going on in a project studying legislative documents produced in the Finnish government and parliament. The article describes the first results of the project. As the document structure definition method, SGML is used in the project. The analysis method is developed and extended from an object-oriented method. The article introduces the main phases of the analysis: Domain definition, object modeling, state modeling, and content modeling. The application of the methodology in the case project and the data gathering methods used are also described."

Abstract: "The SASOUT table model was developed to support the tabular documentation needs of the Publications Division of SAS Institute Inc. SASOUT instances contain sufficient meta information to allow them to be presented in both hard and soft copy. The meta data also makes possible non-traditional and interactive online presentations of the tabular data.

In 1995, research on tables produced by SAS software and on the tables previously used in our documentation resulted in our identification of four table types: simple, intersection, drill-down, and show-all. Imaging these tables on paper, as in the past, presented no significant problems even with SGML source data. However, we anticipated problems presenting our tables in soft copy after experimenting with the capabilities of the CALS table model, which was supported by our SGML software tools.

The CALS model does not support markup for indicating relationships between cells in a table nor directly support row header formatting. These relationships are not critical for producing hard copy, but are very important to our interactive online presentations. Header formatting is important for both hard copy and online presentations from a single source.

The SASOUT table model was developed to provide a means of marking up our tabular data while preserving its characteristics. The markup supports row headers and cell relationships in addition to all CALS features, such as column heads, spanning rows and columns, and alignment of data. The SASOUT model also supports behavior characteristics that allow the specification of online presentation methods.

This paper describes our table types, our platform presentation requirements, extensions we added to the CALS model, and the processing we designed to meet our formatting requirements so far.

The SASOUT DTD is freely available and we look forward to vendors providing support for it and other table DTD's that provide the means to fully identify tabular data."

Abstract: "Unlocking the benefits of information in your documents may mean that you invest more than human resources, money and equipment. What about the pre-process planning time? Investment in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) does not guarantee you immediate return and does not happen at the drop of a hat without a major management investment in pre-planning.

Because most corporations information management's top goal is to produce a much richer information environment, we must make a management commitment to a document analysis process. The process should identify what information in these documents is important enough to migrate to a rich electronic format such as SGML. It may seem obvious that the way to maximize your information is to break it into intelligible chunks in a data base. However, to get those chunks of information into a format that is acceptable by most applications is not a simple process. When that is complete, next comes the targeted conversion by document type.

For Learning Support the goal was to establish an information database that yielded benefits in the area of:

• document creation,
• document updating and revising,,
• database review and validation,
• information reuse, and,
• on-line full-text retrieval and distribution of information.,

The objective was to convert annually some 300,000 pages of technical documents containing complex tables and graphics from several different authoring environments into an industry standard Document Type Definition (DTD), called the Telecommunications Industry Markup (TIM DTD).

This industry standard format, Telecommunication's Industry Markup Document Type Definition (TIMDTD) is an explicit and neutral form of markup. The BCCs, in conjunction with the Telecommunications Industry Forum consisting of representatives from telecommunication vendors, such as Ericson, Siemens, AT&T, and Northern Telecom have unanimously endorsed it as their standard list of SGML markup tag definitions.

This paper identifies key learnings grasped from project management of the SGML Implementation Plan the Learning Support organization at Bellcore. Key outcomes determined were:

1. Document analysis was critical to the success of the [project]
2. The DTD writer's interpretation of the data and its structure required an iterative process with document developers and users. DTDs will change.
3. It was important for acceptance to maintain the document developers view of the textual layout and format of the data while enforcing structure.
4. Management's buy-in was needed at all points in the process
5. Not everyone will be on board the train at the same time."

Abstract: DAPHNE is a document processing system implemented to support joint editing within the German Research Network DFN. It is based on two international standards in the area of document and graphics processing, the Standard Generalized Markup Language SGML and the Computer Graphics Metafile CGM. This paper presents the functionality offered by DAPHNE today as well as plans for future extensions. It also describes the experience gained with a distributed environment of commercial products for processing SGML documents in general and DAPHNE documents in particular.

Abstract: "SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is designed to encode information at the content level, abstracting away from formatting issues. In a well-designed SGML application, font details are not part of the SGML document, and contents may be rearranged or automatically generated. In this light, for professional purposes HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is better considered to be a presentation language for contents that have been stored separately (e.g. in a dedicated SGML environment) than a reliable repository data storage format in itself. This now probably well understood, at least in the SGML community. HTML is tied to a particular, very limited DTD (even ignoring the reality of emerging Microsoft and Netscape dialects), and requires independently specified semantics (i.e. how the Web browser has to interpret the HTML tags)."

"In general, SGML documents will be typeset using informal descriptions of the style semantics for the various elements that occur in a document instance, which requires good communication between the document publisher and the document typesetter. Once a system is set up to process a particular kind of SGML input, that style specification is generally not portable.

"The new ISO standard DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language) aims to become the standard way of linking up SGML information containers with their graphical representation, as part of a suite of complementary ISO standards: SGML, HyTime, SPDL (Standard Page Description Language, based in part on the PostScript language from Adobe). This paper will elaborate on the details of how DSSSL achieves this, how it fits into a complete document production process, how detailed the specification is and what it leaves open, what other functionality is available, and why it was worth waiting for."

Abstract: "Increasing requirements in development documentation for automotive manufacturers such as the number of world-wide development sites (leading to the support of different languages); the speed of the development cycle; and the number of variants of products (re-use of base documentation), has led to the definition of exchange formats for information. This paper examines how SGML technology can be a good solution for problems in this area." [from the published program]

"The development of ECU (electronic control unit) for cars is a highly parallel and complex job. Requirements from different parts of an automotive manufacturer have to be fulfilled. The interfaces between correlated persons are not defined in a way, that an exchange of information is done easily. Business process reengineering activities discovered a big potential for enhancements by using SGML technology as an overall exchange format in these areas.

"Several projects were started, to implement a new process model. This article describes our experiences in projects we realized since the beginning of 1995. The biggest project deals with diagnosis data that is needed to describe parameters to communicate with ECUs. Today you can get many informations about the actual state of internal and external variables of ECUs (for example a coolant temperature). These informations are used to guide a diagnosis process to determine erroneous behaviour of components of a car. The diagnosis data is used in different parts of the company (development, production, service). Even companies that deliver ECUs can be involved in this process. We started a case study to determine the best format for the description of structures. As a result we decided to take SGML. The Document Type Structure (DTD) is presented to the ASAM/ASAP consortium for standardization. This consortium represents the German automotive industry, suppliers and tool companies.

"The system is now in use by 10 to 15 users and will grow in 1997 to 30 to 50 users. There is a process of standardization of diagnosis data in the moment in a consortium called ASAM/ASAP. Our DTD is a proposal to that committee and we think it will be fixed till the end of 1997. Our experience with the technologie SGML are quite good. We can transport the concept very easily to the users.

Abstract: "The aviation industry has a long tradition for information interchange standardization. The first generation of on-line documentation was a paper document duplicate based on SGML. In the future, documentation has to move from the document paradigm to an information paradigm. Then the user will get an 'Information Web' and exactly the information he is looking for. This presentation looks at the challenges and trends in aircraft maintenance documentation."

"In aircraft maintenance and operations documentation structure and form are well defined by the ATA SPEC 100 specification. It was a good foundation bringing that documentation into electronic form using SGML. SGML is today the foundation for ATA SPEC 2100, the aviation standard for electronic document interchange. [...] Tagged information at a well defined granularity makes incremental revisions easy. Taking advantage of the progress in electronic networks, an on-line document update will be possible and leads to totally new worksharing concepts between aircraft manufacturers product support organization and airline engineering."

Abstract: "Most Document Management System architectures can be categorized by the ability to handle and organize information of different kinds. Supporting information based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) involves unique requirements that bear on the tasks of managing structured documents."

"This report overviews approaches to support SGML documents in a number of Document Management System architectures that were candidates to be used in an actual publishing system supporting the publishing and re-purposing of shared information for technical manuals. This publishing system supports content- and presentation-oriented SGML documents for a supplier of military equipment to a Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) Project Office."

Abstract: "Stylesheets have been used to convert the document type of SGML documents. With a stylesheet, a document conforming to a source grammar can be transformed into a document conforming to a target grammar. The paper discusses the following problem: given a stylesheet, a source and a target SGML grammar, is it decidable whether or not all documents conforming to the source grammar are transformed into documents conforming to the target grammar? Using context free extended context free grammars we give a decision procedure for this problem."

"Introduction: In the past year, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) has done more to popularize the notion of Standard Generalized Markup Language than any single preceding use of SGML. Used on the World Wide Web through a graphical client such as Netscape or NCSA Mosaic, HTML documents and their associated image, sound, and digital video files result in sophisticated network publications and services. And even when viewed through the plain text (VT100) client Lynx, HTML files can still be exciting clusters of interlinked documents.

In common with Internet users all over the world, the University of Virginia Library now uses and produces HTML documents; unlike most other academic institutions, however, we came to HTML with practical experience in another, more sophisticated, form of SGML -- that of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. For two years the Electronic Text Center has been using the TEI Guidelines, through several drafts, to tag and distribute hundreds of electronic texts. The purpose of this paper is both to explain how we are using these various forms of SGML mark-up to publish a variety of documents, and to sound a cautionary note about the wholesale use of HTML as a primary authoring language."

Abstract: "The Electronic Text Center is both a physical space within the university library, open to all University of Virginia members and also an on-line collection of many thousands of Internet-accessible texts and images. It is important to us that we perform two tasks simultaneously in order to build our digital library: we are both creating a set of electronic resources, and also creating a user community for it, by training our users to become effective consumers and producers of electronic texts and images. Since 1992, the Etext Center has made available hardware and software for the creation and analysis of electronic texts; it provides training for these new tools and techniques; it acts as a focal point for HTML and SGML development in the humanities at Virginia; and it provides a place in which to use those texts that are not yet accessible on the Internet."

Abstract: "One of the most exciting applications of SGML which has emerged in the recent years is its use in document databases. The structural information embedded in SGML documents makes it possible to query SGML documents and extract information in an automatic manner; however, this querying process has not been standardized. As a result, different SGML database implementations use their own query language syntax, thus making the migration from one system to another a difficult process. In the relational database domains, however, the query language SQL has been a standard for over ten years and is universally used in most relational database systems. Although originally designed for relational databases, SQL is quite powerful for specifying complex queries in a relatively easy-to-understand syntax. With a small set of extensions to take advantage of the hierarchical structure of SGML, SQL can be easily adapted for use with SGML document databases (TAG-496).

The powerful 'generalized' nature of SGML makes it easy to implement SQL as an SGML DTD, so that queries can be expressed as document instances of the SQL DTD. Current SGML authors and users can write queries expressed in this DTD without learning a different language or using a separate editor. Moreover, because of the portable nature of SGML, these queries can be used in any SGML database system and can be converted to regular SQL for use in a relational or Object-Relational/Object-Oriented database system, if necessary. Databases that support the SQL DTD can also store the queries without any extra effort, and subsequently query them for inferring optimization parameters.

This paper presents a representative DTD for the SQL query language, with extensions for use with hierarchically structured documents. It also compares this language with languages proposed and implemented, including SDQL - the query language in the DSSSL standard (DSSSL95). This paper explains the advantages of using this language as a query language in document database systems and the necessity for standardizing the querying process in document databases. Finally, it discusses some implementation issues and complexity measures."

Abstract: "A method for augmenting an SGML document repository with database functionality is presented. SGML (ISO 8879,1986) has been widely accepted as a standard language for writing text with added structural information that gives the text greater applicability. Recently there has been a trend to use this structural information as meta-data in databases. The complex structure of documents, however, makes it difficult to directly map the structural information in documents to database structures. In particular, the flat nature of relational databases makes it extremely difficult to model documents that are inherently hierarchical in nature. Consequently, documents are modeled in object-oriented databases (Abiteboul, Cluet, & Milo, 1993), and object-relational databases (Hoist, 1995), in which SGML documents are mapped into the corresponding database models and are later reconstructed as necessary. However, this mapping strategy is not natural and can potentially cause loss of information in the original SGML documents. Moreover, interfaces for building queries for current document databases are mostly built on form-based query techniques and do not use the 'look and feel' of the documents. This article introduces an implementation method for a complex-object modeling technique specifically for SGML documents and describes interface techniques tailored for text databases. Some of the concepts for a Structured Document Database Management System (SDDBMS) specifically designed for SIL documents are described. A small survey of some current products is also presented to demonstrate the need for such a system."

Abstract: "Up to now SGML has tended to be used primarily in technical publishing applications, usually at a departmental level. However, with today's focus on web-based enterprise information management, and the recent introduction of XML, many more opportunities for SGML have become apparent. This whitepaper surveys the current state of the information industry, from both a business and technical point of view, and shows how SGML and XML technology can and should be positioned within an organization's overall I/T and intranet strategy."