Papers on SGML/XML

[Excerpt]: "The requirement that SGML be valid seems in most contexts so obvious that it would never be questioned, but if document analysis of existing documents reveals violations of structure, the most appropriate model of this information in SGML terms involves invalid SGML. If the creation of invalid SGML is foreclosed for practical reasons, our most honest alternative is to enrich whatever solution we do adopt with annotations in markup that tell the truth: what we are encoding are the equivalent of parser error messages, and the fact that our document violates its basic structure in specific places is informational."

[Extract:] "Les avantages d'une normalisation des ressources textuelles en format électronique par l'utilisation de la TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) ont déjà été présentés dans de nombreux articles. Cette application de la norme SGML propose en effet des directives pour le codage des textes en offrant plus de 500 éléments (et autant d'attributs) permettant de décrire un document. Nous voudrions nous intéresser ici à un type de document particulier, les dialogues homme-machine multimodaux (parole et geste). Un codage de base pour l'ensemble des dialogues, et qui peut être généralement réalisé automatiquement à partir d'une transcription initiale correcte, doit mettre en évidence un certain nombre d'informations parmi lesquelles le locuteur de chaque énoncé, les changements de tours de parole, les pauses. . . A partir de ce codage stable et indépendant du type d'étude que l'on voudra réaliser, il serait souhaitable de mettre en évidence des phénomènes plus spécifiques au niveau du contenu. Parmi ceux-ci, on peut considérer le problème de la référence et plus généralement le problème de la relation pouvant exister entre différents types de syntagmes syntagmes (nominaux et verbaux). En effet, si on analyse un dialogue entre deux individus, il est important de pouvoir dire si un segment de discours réfère à un objet particulier et si son interprétation peut être faite directement ou si celle-ci dépend d'un autre segment. . ."

[Excerpt]: "The Partnership is predicated on the view that SGML markup can be used to create the scholarly frameworks required and that SGML markup offers a practical method for preparing and delivering documentary editions. A close study of the scholarly issues involved in preparing documentary editions led to the publication of "A Prospectus for Electronic Historical Editions" in May 1996 (http://mep.cla.sc.edu/MEP-Docs/proptoc.HTM). The Prospectus set forth a series of design principles; a typology of the kind of editions which might be expected to develop; and a discussion of importance of markup."

[Excerpt]: This is a description of a small corpus linguistics project from start to (well, nearly) finish, undertaken entirely by one not particularly computationally-adept linguist. I focus not just on the end results, but also on the various options and obstacles encountered at each stage of the project. As such it illustrates in a nutshell the strengths and weaknesses of some of the current data- and text-management methodologies and tools for non-specialists. It also may provide a useful model for other linguists and linguistic anthropologists facing similar issues. . . The example of the Salar corpora suggests that it is necessary to store and present such linguistic (and/or anthropological/folkoristic) data in a variety of formats. The queryable-SGML file and/or the SGML-based database is one prototype data-analysis/management system for other linguistic corpora."

[Excerpt]: "MULTEXT-EAST is a spin-off of the LRE project MULTEXT which is intended to fill these gaps by developing significant resources for six CEE languages (Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovenian) and adapting existing tools and standards to them. MULTEXT-EAST extends MULTEXT's scope to CEE languages with the following goals: (1) test and adaptation of language standards; (2) development of an annotated multilingual corpus; (3) development of morpho-lexical resources; (4) adaptation of the MULTEXT corpus tools. This paper describes the Multext-East corpus and its development, including encoding concerns, especially as they arose from the need to handle languages for which encoding practices are not yet well established. It will also report on the special encoding concerns that arose in the process of aligning parallel texts in the six languages plus English."

[Excerpt]: "Now that the TEI Guidelines have been in use long enough to create a substantial base of encoded data, projects whose source material and encoding strategies are similar can benefit from comparing approaches to common problems, and assessing whether their divergences are justified by differences in data or philosophy, or merely represent unnecessary variation in the application of the TEI. . .One area of primary source transcription which deserves examination along these lines is the classification of proper nouns and similar words and phrases, using the elements described in Chapter 20 of the TEI Guidelines . . .The proposed session will present several perspectives on this problem, with several aims: first, of allowing the participating projects (and those represented in the audience) to compare practices and discuss the status of their variation; second, of situating the specific problem of encoding proper nouns within the context of scholarly analysis, so as to create a more precise sense of the needs which the encoding is intended to address; and third, to think more broadly about the pressures and constraints on classification systems in text encoding."

[Extract:] "The National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) has been designing, building, managing, and maintaining the databases on Japanese classical literature for academic researchers both in Japan and foreign countries. The NIJL's database system is comprised from a computer and inter-network, and provides three catalogue databases (i.e., the Catalogue of Holding Microfilms of Manuscripts and Printed Books on Japanese Classical Literature, the Catalogue of Holding Manuscripts and Printed Books on Japanese Classical Literature, and the Bibliography of Research Papers on Japanese Classical Literature). . . There are a several languages or standards for describing text structures, including SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), TeX, PostScript, and ODA (Open Document Architecture). Among these, SGML is the only language that can describe the logical structure of text. As it is established as ISO and JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) standard, many applications have been developed. At present, we are under reconstruction of catalogue databases and full text databases. Both data can essentially be considered as nested string fields with variable length. SGML can describe the complicated text structure such as repeating groups, nests, an order of appearance, and number of appearances. If a data search is regarded as 'a search for a specific string in text data,' constructing database system that uses a string searching device is possible. Actually, in research on Japanese literature, search by string is more common way than search by numbers. Meanwhile, fast string search devices and software are being developed and sold; all of the products are capable of handling SGML data. Consequently, we have done some projects based on SGML."

[Extract:] "The Orlando Project, based at the Universities of Alberta and Guelph, is producing the first full scholarly history of British women's writing in printed and electronic form. Under the direction of Patricia Clements, the Orlando team comprises five co-investigators, two post-doctoral fellows, a project librarian and eight graduate research assistants. Orlando has received a SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant for $1.6 million over five years beginning in July 1996, and is also supported by the Universities of Alberta and Guelph. Orlando is using computing technology and SGML at all stages within the project, but one of its key contributions to humanities computing methodologies is the use of SGML to encode interpretive information in basic research notes as the research is being carried out. The authors of the printed volumes will draw on this database of SGML-encoded information as they write. The database will also be used to create a number of hypertext products for research and teaching."

[Extract:] "The rationales for Virginia Tech's ETD project, include: (1) Preparing graduate students for their professional careers by training them in the use of digital libraries and introducing them to electronic publishing; (2) Promoting collaboration between graduate research programs at separate universities by making graduate scholarship visible and accessible via a network archive; and, (3) More efficient use of the university's library and administrative resources. The channels Virginia Tech has established to guide the finished thesis or dissertation from the student's personal computer to the offices of the graduate school and to the library's on-line archive will be reviewed, stressing that an important component of the Virginia Tech project has been to develop potential models (as opposed to absolute standards) for ETD production elsewhere. Also to be discussed are document formats for the completed ETD (PDF and SGML), multimedia applications, and the archiving of the ETD with UMI. Finally, a statistical analysis of existing Virginia Tech ETDs will be presented. . ."

[Extract:] "This session explores the reasons for and the challenges of setting up a text processing application using SGML for lexicographic data. More particularly, it presents the experience of a group of researchers in the Humanities who were forced to become familiar with the SGML standard, to help design a Document Type Definition (DTD), and to get used to using SGML authoring tools to write a dictionary. The dictionary in question is the Bilingual Canadian Dictionary (BCD), which is still in preparation. As its tentative title indicates, it is a bilingual dictionary which will reflect English and French as they are used in Canada. The creation of this dictionary is the major objective of a vast collaborative research project, called 'Comparative Lexicography of French and English in Canada', funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The project involves three universities: the University of Ottawa (which is also the administrative centre), the University of Montreal, and Laval University."

[Extract:] ". . . in 1994 we started developing the MILE environment and the accompanying MILE Markup Language (MML). While this paper will demonstrate the MILE environment, the primary focus will be on the design of the markup language. . . Over the next couple of years the MILE project hopes to create a Lesson Builder for the WWW which would translate MML into a combination of JavaScript and HTML. We also hope to create a SGML DTD so that we can take advantage of the SGML tools available. This, along with input from users who desire more functionality, may lead to further revisions to MML."

[Extract:] "This work belongs to a project which aims at a real-world application and due to this reason the categories of the SGML-based standard News Industry Text Format (NITF) have been applied. NITF was developed by the International Press Telecommunication Council (IPTC) for the exchange of news messages. An interesting feature of the NITF standard is that besides structural mark up, it allows also semantic encoding. Our aim in this project has been twofold: first, to develop an algorithm for the automatic identification of those phrases in new incoming messages which contain semantic information, e.g., names of persons, organizations, places, weekdays etc. Second, to mark up the messages according to the respective NITF categories and export the marked up messages as an NITF conformant SGML text. The degree of correctness of the automatic marked up texts is decisive for the applicability of this method for the daily practice."

[Extract:] "This 125,000-page project takes the University of Virginia Library into a level of archival-quality text and image production rarely seen in rare books archives. In preparing for this project we have tackled issues of funding, production-level digital equipment and practices, partnerships with commercial publishers to disseminate the results, and large-scale storage issues. This paper will outline the project, explain the workflow, equipment, and text and image standards that we think appropriate for creating data of long-term viability, and explore the lessons we are learning (and expect to learn) regarding the economics of undertaking a cost-recovery process. The project will combine high-quality color page images of all 125,000 pages (including covers and spines) with TEI-encoded text versions, allowing scholars all over the world a rare sense of the physical reality of the volumes being studied as well as providing a fully-searchable SGML database."

[Extract:] "This paper reports on the experience of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in developing electronic publishing solutions for its LinguaLinks product (SIL 1996). LinguaLinks is an electronic performance support system designed to assist field workers with a wide range of tasks related to language learning, language analysis, and language development. The paper first introduces the LinguaLinks model of performance support and CELLAR -- the object-oriented database system that is used to implement it. Our approach to electronic publishing is to first build the information as a structure of objects in the database, and then to use multiple CELLAR stylesheets to map the information onto multiple markup schemes. The object database thus serves as a springboard that allows us to vault the information into any number of formats for publishing. The paper illustrates this approach to electronic publishing by focusing on one application area that LinguaLinks supports, namely, lexical database development. It first shows how the tutorial and reference documents that give help on how to build a dictionary are mapped onto different markup schemes for publication as a Folio Views infobase, a Windows help system, and an HTML Web document. It then shows how the dictionaries that are built by using LinguaLinks are mapped onto HTML markup to provide a display format on the Web and onto TEI markup to provide a richer format for information interchange and archiving."

[Extract:] "Extensible Markup Language (XML for short) is being designed under the auspices of the World-Wide-Web Consortium (W3C); the larger goal of this effort is 'to enable future Web user agents to receive and process generic SGML in the way that they are now able to receive and process HTML. As in the case of HTML, the implementation of SGML on the Web will require attention not just to structure and content (the domain of SGML per se) but also to link semantics and display semantics.' (See http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/SGML/Activity for the W3C's description of this activity.) As a subgoal, we are creating an SGML application profile, XML, that is designed to provide many of the benefits of SGML in a lightweight, easy-to-use, easy-to-implement dialect that omits many of the difficult or problematic features of the full standard. This paper is a report on the XML specification; if time allows, some information will also be provided on the progress of the work toward a typology of links and link behaviors. At the time this abstract is prepared, the XML specification has been made public, but is still officially a working draft."

[Extract:] ". . . our copy-texts will be taken from the original editions themselves as held in libraries around the world, though of course our procedures will be informed by the findings of previous scholars, especially the editors of the Cornell Wordsworth series. Fourth, our e-texts will be "marked-up" or tagged using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) in conformity with the principles of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Fifth, we plan to link our transcribed e-texts to scanned images of the original printed editions in order to give the reader some sense of the look of the poems upon the page. Finally, this scholarly hypertext edition will be issued on CD-ROM in the first instance, with the intention of proceeding to network distribution as soon as it becomes practical."

[Extract:] "Scholarship increasingly depends on electronic document repositories and the growth of digital libraries. As in physical libraries, the documents to be housed in scholarly collections include historical documents, literary works, reference texts, and government publications. Even more apparent in computer-readable form are collections of business documents (from annual reports and customer literature to procedures manuals and internal communications) and linguistic corpora (collections of spoken and written communication assembled to reflect the uses of language). Gray literature, including technical reports, personal communications, and online help information, also constitutes a growing text resource. SGML provides a method to describe the structure of a complex document in which components, layout, or other chosen features of the text are indicated through markup. The TEI Guidelines use SGML to define a set of comprehensive conventions for representing documents, and thus they establish a basis for scholarly communications. HTML defines another set of tags to delineate text structures. Beyond text representation, however, communications support also requires mechanisms for querying and manipulating structured documents."

[Extract:] "The markup of EPS information was an evolutionary process i.e., it was not clear at the start what features should be tagged and continual modification of the DTD was required to ensure that the same definition could be used effectively for all three hypertext formats and the question of the optimum level of mark up for portability is still not wholly resolved. An SGML document ensures that there is an accurate description of the logical structure and components, but to achieve maximum functionality from the target hypertext system, modifications were frequently desirable and much vital and system dependent work had to be done during the parsing stage. Data portability is still greatly constrained by the requirements of the target system."