[April 06, 2002]   XML Schemas for Historical Event Markup and Linking Project (HEML).    A posting from Bruce G. Robertson describes updated XML resources developed within the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project (HEML). Centered at Mount Allison University and the University of Virginia, the HEML project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; it is also affiliated with the Stoa Consortium for electronic publication in the humanities. Using the Apache Cocoon2 web publishing engine, the HEML project "provides a means of coordinating and navigating disparate historical materials on the internet. It includes: (1) an XML schema for historical events which describes the events' participants, dates, location and keywords; the schema associates these with source materials in print or on the web; (2) XSLT stylesheets that combine conforming documents and generate lists, SVG maps, and graphical timelines out of them." One may imagine HEML as "a reasonably light language that can associate the concepts 'William the Conqueror', '1066 AD in the Gregorian Calendar' and 'Hastings' with, among other things, an image of the Bayeux tapestry and with other pertinent information on the web, in many different languages and calendrical systems." [Full context]

[August 21, 2000] "The Historical Event Markup and Linking project explores XML-related technologies to develop a set of text markup and transformation tools that are useful to historians world-wide. Minimally, these tools will include: (1) Historical event XML elements. These will be flexible enough to represent most known events in the past while working well with existing document encoding schemes, such as XHTML, TEI-Lite and Docbook. (2) XSL transformations on the historical event elements. Our goal is to produce useful, and possibly new, views of historical events, through charts, time-lines and maps, and add to these the linking capabilities of marked-up text. Principles: (1) HEML is a multilingual system and will illustrate this capability in its test documents and examples. (2) HEML is developed with free software, ensuring that even scholars with meager resources will be able to make use of this project. (3) Recognizing that there is a dearth of comprehendible XML applications, especially in the academic realm, HEML will regularly publish working examples of our materials and explain what additional resources were used to make them work. (4) All code produced by HEML will be copy-written under an open source license, ensuring that they -- and derivative works based on them -- will be free from cost and open to scrutiny. HEML is hosted by Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. It is a joint project of faculty in Mount Allison's departments of Classics and of Mathematics and Computer Science."

References:

• HEML Project Home Page

• HEML XML Schema, with the namespace http://www.heml.org/schemas/2001-07-02/heml; see also the XHTML variant [cache]

• Introduction to HEML Project description.

• User's Guide to the Resources of the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project

• Prototype XML DTD; [cache]

• Description, PDF

• Compare: VCal

• Compare: ICalendar

• Contact: Bruce G. Robertson