A communiqué from Rick Jelliffe (Academia Sinica Computing Centre) reports on the version 1.5 release of Schematron, including references for the updated specification, implementation, conformance tests, mailing list, and schemas web site. Schematron is a "simple XML-based assertion language using patterns in trees. Its uses include validation, automated link generation, and for triggering actions based on complex criteria. Version 1.5 adds support for adds 'phases', a way of grouping patterns together to allow dynamic validation where different rules and assertions will be tested according to the phase, 'diagnostics', for generating very specific diagnostic hints, 'abstract rules', which allow more convenient declarations and type extension, and various smaller changes to allow elements to be decorated with more kinds of information that metastylesheets or user interfaces need."
"The Schematron is a language and toolkit for making assertions about patterns found in XML documents. It can be used as a friendly validation language and for automatically generating external annotation (links, RDF, perhaps Topic Maps). Because it uses paths rather than grammars, it can be used to assert many constraints that cannot be expressed by DTDs or XML Schemas.
"Schematron can be trivially implemented using XSLT in two stages and Open Source implementations in Python, Perl and OmniMark of early versions have also been made. The reference implementation is skeleton1-5.xsl. It has been tried on 12 different and the test results are available on that page, togther with API documentation and samples of .BAT files for running the code with various XSLT processors. (The implementation is still beta for the next few weeks.) [From http://www.ascc.net/xml/schematron.]
From the 2001-02-13 communiqué
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 07:28:02 +0800 From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au> Subject: Schematron 1.5 available: specification, implementation, conformance tests, mailling list, schemas site
Schematron 1.5 is the latest version of this simple XML-based assertion language using patterns in trees. Its uses include validation, automated link generation, and for triggering actions based on complex criteria.
Schematron 1.5 adds "phases", a way of grouping patterns together to allow dynamic validation where different rules and assertions will be tested according to the phase, "diagnostics", for generating very specific diagnostic hints, "abstract rules", which allow more convenient declarations and type extension, and various smaller changes to allow elements to be decorated with more kinds of information that metastylesheets or user interfaces need.
The specification for the Schematron 1.5 language can be found at:
http://www.ascc.net/xml/resource/schematron/Schematron2000.html.
The Schematron namespace http://www.ascc.net/xml/schematron is the location of a RDDL resource description directory. The resources available include the Schematron 1.5 specification, a Schematron schema for the language, an XML Schemas schema, a DTD, a language quick reference, links to the ZVON tutorials, and technical articles.
There is a reference implementation, skeleton1-5.xsl, at http://www.ascc.net/xml/schematron/1.5/. The implementation includes a sample "metastylesheet" to implement an XML conformance language and a Schematron schema which can be used to test the output of the conformance metastylesheet. These tools have been used to test the implementation against more than ten different XSLT implementations: the results of "Screamatron Torture Test"are available.
Schematron has an active mailing list, the schematron-love-in, which can be joined at http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/schematron-love-in This list is archived and can be made available in daily digests.
News and details concerning Schematron schemas and implementations is available from the Academia Sinica Schematron home page, at:
http://www.ascc.net/xml/resource/schematron.
