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."

From the xmlschema-dev posting:

The point of HEML is to define XML elements that outline historical events asserted in documents across the web and to parse and display these elements in interesting and useful ways. Imagine 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; now dream about information such as this provided on the web in many different languages and calendrical systems, and you have the idea.

Alongside its schemas, the HEML project also provides transformations of its event elements into things like SVG maps and timelines, and various HTML lists. All this is wrapped in a Cocoon2-based webapp freely downloadable under a pot-pourri of open source licences.

Of particular interest to this group may be the automatically generated documentation for my schema (follow links from www.heml.org to 'DTDs and Schemas'). The XSLT that does this is a bit of a quick hack that grew out of a simpler transformation that just listed declared groups, elements and types. Still, I can't help thinking that a generalized schema documentation XSLT application would make, e.g., a plum MA thesis.

A student of mine wrote a variant of the base schema for use as part of an XHTML family language, one that simple allows our event elements to appear within <p> tags... We plan to roll its features into the stand-alone schema in the next version and to add support for more difficult chronological concepts and for historical periods.