What are "Clippings?"
Contents
- IBM Multimodal Annotation Tool Supports Video and Audio Annotations for MPEG-7 Files.
- DSTC Project Titanium Announces First Public Production Release of JackSVG Version 1.0.
- Extreme Papers on Multiple (Overlapping, Concurrent) Hierarchies.
- Software to Convert Relational Databases to XML.
- W3C Workshop on Device Independent Authoring Techniques.
- Resource Model Composer from IBM alphaWorks.
[August 26, 2002] IBM Multimodal Annotation Tool Supports Video and Audio Annotations for MPEG-7 Files. IBM alphaWorks has released the IBM Multimodal Annotation Tool, which "assists in annotating MPEG files with MPEG-7 meta data. It provides the means for annotating three different multimodal types: video, audio with video, or audio without video. Each shot in the video sequence can be annotated with static scene descriptions, key object descriptions, event descriptions, and other lexicon sets. Audio segments can be delimited and described as well. The annotated descriptions are stored as MPEG-7 descriptions in an XML file. The IBM Multimodal Annotation Tool can also open MPEG-7 files in order to display the annotations for the corresponding MPEG file. This tool also allows customized lexicons to be created, saved, downloaded, and updated. The IBM Multimodal Annotation Tool takes an MPEG file as the required input source. The tool also requires a corresponding shot segmentation file, where the video sequence input is segmented into smaller units, called video shots, by detecting the scene cuts, dissolutions, and fadings. This shot file can be loaded into the tool from other sources. The installation kit for the tool contains the NIST TREC-2002 Video Track shot files converted to the tool's format. As an alternative, the shot file can also be generated by the IBM CueVideo Shot Detection Tool Kit or the IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool (also present on alphaWorks) and used directly by the tool. " See also the "IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool Supports XML Metadata Description" (tool for annotating video sequences with MPEG-7 metadata).
[August 23, 2002] DSTC Project Titanium Announces First Public Production Release of JackSVG Version 1.0. On August 21, 2002 the DSTC's Project Titanium announced an initial public release of JackSVG. JackSVG is "a Perl application that takes your presentation contents, written in a simple XML-based language, and writes out a single self-contained SVG file that contains your entire presentation. Presenting the slide show is as simple as loading the file in your Web brower and pushing the on-screen buttons. JackSVG has recently been rewritten to support many new featues. It allows the user to customise presentation look and feel through 'skin' support. It is written entirely in pure Perl so it can run on many platforms. It is also modular, making it easy for users to inspect and modify. It's also Free, and is available under a very liberal distribution license. To see JackSVG in action, take a look at some sample presentations written by Hoylen Sue." Project Titanium is a DSTC project aimed at exploring secure, light weight, enterprise data access and exchange using XML. See: "W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)."
[August 05, 2002] Extreme Papers on Multiple (Overlapping, Concurrent) Hierarchies. Several presentations at the Extreme Markup Languages 2002 Conference will cover (XML) Topic Maps -- as usual. Two papers take up the special problem of using the hierarchical notation to model information that is not fundamentally hierarchical, or in its instance representation implies simultaneously several overlapping, non-congruent hierarchical structures. Jeni Tennison (Jeni Tennison Consulting) and Wendell Piez (Mulberry Technologies) will present "The Layered Markup and Annotation Language (LMAL)": "Representing multiple hierarchies within a single document has always been a problem for XML. To try to address the problems of representing multiple hierarchies and of annotating existing tree structures with type information (as in the PSVI), we have developed a layered data model based on the Core Range Algebra presented at Extreme 2002 by Gavin Nicol. This data model views documents as strings over which span a number of named ranges, each of which can themselves have associated metaranges with their own internal structure..." Nicol's proposed 'Core Range Algebra' "can be used to address and sequence ranges, unions, intersections, and concatenations of arbitrary portions of information resources..." Patrick Durusau (Society of Biblical Literature) will present "Coming Down From the Trees: Next Step in The Evolution of Markup?" -- arguing that "markup syntax without the presumption of a tree structure allows the recording of arbitrary structures in a text (including a tree if so desired) as well as the overlapping structures that have so far eluded a commonly used solution..." Update 2002-10-02: See LMNL website and "Just-In-Time-Trees (JITTs): Next Step in the Evolution of Markup?" General references in "Markup Languages and (Non-) Hierarchies."
[August 03, 2002] Software to Convert Relational Databases to XML. Murali Mani announced the release of "a small piece of software which converts relational databases to XML documents. This works on any database that can be accessed via JDBC. The main features are: (a) A database is converted into one document. This is our belief, and this ensures that we do not need to define cross-document referencing. (b) Relationships are represented in multiple ways: (i) parent child relationships represent 1:n relationships; (ii) ID-IDREF represent 1:n relationships; (iii) foreign key/key represent relationships like in relational databases. I would like to argue that these are excellent candidates for data modeling using XML schemas. Furthermore, I will do a poster presenation on the details of this at Extreme 2002. And there is a nocturne scheduled on Wednesday; this will cover data modeling using XML schemas in general..." See (1) "Data Modeling using XML Schemas" and (2) "NeT and CoT: Translating Relational Schemas to XML Schemas Using Semantic Constraints." General references: "XML Schemas."
[August 03, 2002] W3C Workshop on Device Independent Authoring Techniques. W3C has issued a Call for Participation in a Workshop on Device Independent Authoring Techniques, to be held 25-26 September 2002 at SAP University, St. Leon-Rot, Germany. "The goals of this workshop are to (1) discuss the issues to be faced in authoring for multiple devices and the techniques that can be used to address them; (2) understand how existing markup languages can be used to achieve greater device independence; (3) identify areas where further markup standards may be needed in order to support greater device independence when authoring Web applications. [The problem:] "It is unreasonable to expect that a Web application that has been developed for the PC screen can be delivered in an acceptable way to other kinds of devices such as printers, phones, PDAs, TVs, in-car systems or voice-oriented systems. To get an acceptable result, that takes into account the capabilities of the device, the application author may end up creating multiple versions of their content and code." The event is part of the W3C's Device Independence Activity (cellular phones, TV, digital cameras, and in-car computers, etc.) The results of the workshop, including submitted position statements, position papers, presentations and discussion notes, will be made public on the Web. The workshop is an open event: everybody interested in contributing to W3C's Device Independence work is welcome; however, space is limited to 50 participants.
[August 02, 2002] Resource Model Composer from IBM alphaWorks. IBM alphaWorks recently released a Resource Model Composer tool with a visual editor and a processing engine. The Java-based visual editor "allows generation of a concise description of an IT resource's syntax. The engine can generically manipulate the IT resources according to this generated specification. This tool is intended for the software developer who needs to provide access to a large number of IT Resources and parameters in an effective way with minimal or no need for programming. Using a visual editor, a consise XML language is defined from visual building blocks describing, at the same time, the syntactical structure of the system management information and the information on how to find the requested data item in the system management resource. This XML specification of the resource is used to generate the input for a preprocessor for the Sun-metamata-webgain Javacc parser generator. The preprocessor collects information necessary for modifying or adding information to the resource or for building up a resource from scratch... Also generated out of the above XML specification is a navigational tree, the Schema, that specifies in detail how to locate and access the requested piece of data in the system management or other IT resource. A processing engine, the Resource Controller, is provided, which, when retrieving or modifying a system maqnagement or other IT resource, locates the container of the data based on XML information, parses it using the generated parser, and locates it using the navigational information. It also has the ability to modify the information based on the XML information." See additional information in the "Platform Requirements for Resource Model Composer."
