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the SGML '95 Home PageYuri Rubinsky, President,
SoftQuad
Tommie Usdin, Vice President and
Debbie Lapeyre, Sr. SGML Consultant,
ATLIS Consulting
Norman W. Scharpf, President, GCA
Yuri Rubinsky, President, SoftQuad and SGML '95 Conference Chair and
Tommie Usdin, Vice President, ATLIS Consulting Group and Conference Co-Chair
Debbie Lapeyre, Senior SGML Consultant, ATLIS Consulting Group, and Conference Co-Chair
Dr. James D. Mason, Convenor, ISO Working Group 8 and Oak Ridge National Laboratories
Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb, Consultant, Information Management Consulting
SGML's inventor analyzes some key information processing directions and the
challenges and opportunities they present for SGML users. How will trends like online
information services, Windows 95, and "SGML purity", affect you and SGML in the coming
year?
Eric Severson, Vice President, Market Strategy and Corporate Development,
Interleaf
SGML is often championed by technical enthusiasts and sold to others primarily on its
technical merits. While these arguments are often valid, they are not always persuasive.
Especially when technicians begin fervently debating the fine points, SGML often appears
to business people more as a religion than a practical implementation strategy. However,
the business reasons for structured documents and SGML are in fact quite compelling, and
can be explained in terms that both senior managers and technologists will understand.
This presentation takes a powerful look at SGML in its broader business context, covering
the following critical points: The basic business issues motivating the need for
structured information and vendor-independent standards -- how these requirements can be
specifically related to operational management's need to improve business processes and
to senior management's ultimate objectives of increasing revenue, market share,
profitability and cash flow.
Dianne Kennedy, Consultant, SGML Resource Center;
Bob Barlow, Consultant, SAIC; and
Kurt Conrad, Consultant, Sagebrush
Implementing SGML can be an enormous task. To be successful, an implementor must have a
good technical background in SGML and must have a clear understanding of data flow and
SGML system functionality. Gaining an understanding of the key components of an SGML
system is critical. This presentation is designed to provide the SGML newcomer with an
overview of the major classes of SGML tools and a brief review of the products
commercially available today. Presenters for this session are independent SGML
consultants who specialize in the design and implementation of SGML-based information
systems.
Pamela L. Gennusa, Director, Database Publishing Systems, Ltd.
Most companies implement SGML in order to see an improvement in their business, to
realize a benefit. For this improvement, they are willing to make an investment. But how
much? This presentation examines the trade-offs when deciding to implement SGML. Examples
are used to illustrate underestimated efforts that fail to realize any benefits,
overambitious endeavors that demonstrate the principle of diminishing returns, and
well-measured implementations that provide the company with both timetable and intangible
benefits for their investment.
Chris Wheedleton, Information Technology Engineer, SAIC
This presentation will discuss the prototype system that SAIC has created for the
Defense Mapping Agency. SGML is used to place DMA navigational documentation on CD-ROM
which will give navigators a greater functionality in using navigational information.
The presentation will show the DTD and its content tagging schemes and demonstrate the
prototype model of the CD-ROM data.
Beth Micksch, Senior Manager, Standards-based Solutions Group, Intergraph
Corporation
Systems and general text entities can easily be managed and manipulated by an SGML
author or technical writer. Some of these entities require standardization within a
corporation so that they can be shared, but not modified by a random user. Others must
be customized for a particular document or group. A description of tools and methods
used to accomplish this task as well as a description of actual user environments where
it is implemented will be outlined. Special features used in document translation will
also be discussed.
Maria Miller, Senior Technical Publications Specialist, and
Bob Tabone, HEADS Program Manager, Hitachi America
Hitachi America has defined a strategy for electronic document production and
publishing of its technical documentation that supports their objective of "create
once, publish many". This presentation will discuss this strategy which is called
the Hitachi Electronic Applications Document System (HEADS). It will outline what
the strategy calls for and discuss how the Pinnacles DTD is a foundation. It will
cover the steps that were taken to create a single source library for technical
documentation. Hitachi America receives its technical documentation from authors
in Japan who work in a mixed hardware and software environment. In addition, the
technical documentation is both authored in English by Japanese speakers and
authored in Japanese and then translated into English. In order to move to a
single source library, Hitachi America had to work within the limits imposed by
the infrastructure that exists in Japan. The challenges of this process will be
discussed.
David Sklar, Director of Applications, Electronic Book Technologies
SGML's entity features support the assembly of a document from a collection
of modules that must be precisely enumerated and absorbed in toto. Breaking out
of these limitations enables publishers to graduate from mere assembly to highly
sophisticated "construction", in which novel SGML documents are auto-generated
via combinations of queries (in SGML infobases and/or relational databases) and
SGML transformations. This presentation discusses the limitations of assembly
via entities and an introduction to the concept of document construction (DC).
A description of current proprietary implementations of DC engines is given as
well as a proposal for the role of standards like HyTime and DSSSL in the
continuing evolution of DC technology.
Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb
The ISO recently approved changes to the HyTime standard (ISO/IEC 10744)
that have profound implications for general use of SGML as well. These result
from the alignment of DSSSL and HyTime, and from the independent specification
of "general facilities" on which the HyTime architecture depends. These
facilities, which can be used by documents and systems that do not necessarily
support the HyTime architecture, include: architectural forms, including derived
architectures with multiple base architectures, entity management that supports
Formal System Identifiers with URLs, multibyte character sets, and archives
(e.g., TAR, SBENTO), and a common model -- shared by HyTime and DSSSL -- of
information recognized by an SGML parser. These and other related issues will
be discussed.
Nick Carr, President, Allette Systems
This presentation will discuss the challenges managers face with the requirement
to see what a consolidated document looked like at any specific point in time.
An example of this is the requirement for lawyers to see the consolidation of
an Act and its Amendments at the time an offense was committed rather than the
present. While document databases will store and manage versions and changes
(deltas) to documents, managing the actual semantics of the change is a problem
that has been very difficult to address. This presentation will demonstrate a
technique for solving this issue regardless of the database or editing environment.
Jean-Pierre Gaspart, Managing Director, ACSE
This presentation will discuss the document process for simultaneous publication
in 11 languages of the 1500 page Budget of the European Commission. The creation,
translation, proofreading, editing and publishing process is highly complex
and involves various parties each using their own SGML or non-SGML system to
feed data into a central SGML repository. The system is operational and provides
the responsible editor, the Office for Official Publications of the European
Communities, with permanent capacity for checking the status of each of the
linguistic versions that are being prepared for publication.
Sean McGrath, Technical Director, Digitome Ltd.
This presentation will introduce an integrated SGML transformation architecture
called IDM - Intelligent Document Manager. The philosophical approach to SGML
transformation taken by IDM is similar to the STTP of DSSSL. This presentation
will show how this approach simplifies SGML transformation programming, allows
transformations to be reused in different transformation projects, simplifies
project management, and increases the quality of the production process.
Ron Turner, Co-Owner, Soph-Ware Associates
It is a curious irony that a portion of the SGML standard as arcane as Annex
H addresses some of the most practical issues among SGML systems: machine
resources, possible intractability, visual context checking, and overall
simplicity. Model group notation, as the Annex says, resembles the regular
expression notation of automata theory. This presentation suggests Petri Nets
as a modeling and design framework for such complex parsing tasks. Petri Nets
are not simply another clever notation. They are mathematically equivalent to
FSAs, thus assuring a true mapping of SGML content models. Some visual comparisons
between content models and their corresponding FSAs and Petri Nets offer a
striking argument to consider Petri Nets as viable contenders in SGML
systems design.
Chet Ensign, Director of Electronic Documentation, Logical Design
Solutions
No one will deny that obstacles and roadblocks are encountered when trying to
adopt SGML. Why won't writers give up WYSIWYG word processors? Why can't the
corporate communications department and the print publication department talk
to each other? Why doesn't the President see that there is a problem here?
This presentation will outline these issues from the top of the organization
to the bottom and back again. It will conclude with strategies for identifying
the issues that will be important at your organization and suggest ways to get
around them.
Maureen Prettyman, Computer Specialist, National Library of Medicine
The National Library of Medicine uses an object-oriented search and retrieval
system that relies on SGML-encoded data to present to the searcher the contents
of a document and context of the retrieved data. Although retrofitting
paper-published documents into an SGML-dependent system is not a trivial task,
it has proven to be well worth the effort as the data are readily prepared for
publication electronically through a variety of systems and across multiple
platforms. This presentation will detail the advantages that the Library has
seen since choosing to implement SGML.
Russell Vann, Consultant, Chartered Association of Certified
Accountants
This case study will show how and why the Association of Certified Accountants
(A.C.C.A.) converted its documents to SGML and the tangible financial benefits
obtained by investing in SGML. It will discuss how SGML has allowed flexibility
in marketing the A.C.C.A.'s product to a wider audience. Further, it will answer
the following: why SGML is the answer to publishing financial information; how
investment in SGML "future-proofs" documentation; why there is an apparent lack
of knowledge about SGML within the financial sector; and whether there can be
a consensus on a set of standard DTDs.
Ken Holman, Chief Technology Officer, Microstar Software Ltd.
This presentation is a case history describing the technical manual production
system of a supplier of military equipment to a Canadian Department of National
Defense (DND) Project Office. The nature of the structure of the information
model is content-oriented, based on the physical equipment breakdown structure
(EBS). The nature of the structure of the technical manuals is
presentation-oriented, based on a book paradigm. The system architecture and
philosophy of operation are described.
Erland Overby and Petter Thorsrud, Center for Information Technology Services,
University of Oslo
NOR/MARK is a markup standard for the publishing industry in Norway based
on "SGML compliance not SGML dependency". This presentation will discuss
the background of why tools were selected and the benefits that they add to
further developments of conversions to NOR/MARK or other DTDs, and from other
stylesheets than the NOR/MARK-specific DTD. Future plans and hopes on the
effect of new editing, conversion and layout/pagination tools enhancements
and specialized versions of NOR/MARK '96 translation will also be discussed.
Brian Travis, President, Information Architects
There are advantages and disadvantages to each of the various approaches
to SGML database design: relational, full-text, object-oriented, and
object-relational. There are places where each may be appropriate.
Carol Ellerbach, Senior Database Developer and
Bill Trippe, Lead Database Developer, Inso Corporation
It is SGML's ingenious distinction between form and processing that
provides the scaffolding for Inso Corporation's entire electronic
publishing operation. The presentation will outline the benefits that
have been seen at every stage of processing. The fact that SGML is
independent from any particular processing requirements has repeatedly
worked to their advantage in unexpected ways. These will be highlighted.
Bob Yencha, Sr. SGML Systems Analyst, National Semiconductor;
Tom Jeffery, Principal Technical Writer, Hitachi;
Alfred Elkerbout, Manager Product Information Development, Philips Semiconductors;
Melanie Yunk, Program Manager, Strategic Publishing Processes, Intel Corporation;
Jeff Barton, Manager, Information Systems and Application Support, Semiconductor Marketing Communications, Texas Instruments;
Tommie Usdin, Vice President, ATLIS Consulting Group
The Pinnacles Component Information Standard is an SGML application standard
for the interchange of technical information about electric components such
as semiconductor products. The standard specifies how the SGML data for
interchange is to be organized and tagged, and expects that variations on
the published standard will be used for data creation and by display applications.
Representatives of five organizations that are creating PCIS documents will
discuss their approaches including SGML in the production cycle of their
technical documentation, conversion of existing documents to PCIS form,
development of their PCIS Authoring-set DTDs, tool selection and customization,
and user training.
Sebastian Holst, President, Texcel, USA
This presentation will position the recent and classic DBMS technologies
(relational, object-oriented, object-relational, extended relational, etc.)
in light of their relative merits in supporting document database information.
Specific topics to be discussed will be document and database management
evolution and the relationships/dependencies between the two technologies,
the core competencies that have arisen out of each of these disciplines and
the importance of integration, the role of standards such as SGML, SQL, CORBA
and others in building broad information management solutions, and pitfalls
and opportunities that have cropped up as technology and commercial products
rapidly unfold.
Mark Baker, Manager, Information Engineering Methods, Meridian
Information Products, Nortel
Nortel has developed a Component Based Information Development system (CBID)
to move away from using SGML to manage their authoring. CBID is a method for
capturing and managing information as a collection of generic components which
can later be selected and assembled to create specific information about products
in any format desired. The presentation will also discuss the two roles
that SGML plays in CBID. Complex components are tagged in SGML, and the
database queries produce an SGML instance which is processed to produce
the desired form of output.
Mark Shelman, Manager, Electronic Document Delivery, Semiconductor Research Corporation, and
Robert B. Warren, Ph.D., Computer Systems Consultant, Computing Works, Inc.
In converting the results of the SRCs research efforts from exclusively
paper form to electronic distribution (including electronic books on
CD-ROM to multiple platforms), SRC developed a document processing
system to deal specifically with the issues that arose. This presentation
discusses these issues.
Mike Maziarka, Xyvision, Inc.
Since its inception, proponents of SGML have heralded "data reuse" as a key
benefit of using SGML. But prior to the widespread use of document management
systems, this statement was more visionary than reality. The reason being
that many still used file mechanisms for storing data. As a result, information
reuse was minimal. Now, with the introduction of document management systems
which support storing information at a much finer granular level, document
creators and users are able to use SGML as a mechanism for defining the
storage units for their data. This presentation will give the attendees an
appreciation for the issues associated with reusing information within the
scope of a document management system. It will also enable them to explore
the use of SGML modeling constructs to achieve their desired results.
Marcy Thompson, Manager, Consulting and Training, Passage Systems
SGML should be used to enrich data with whatever is most important about that
data. Typically, this is structural or content-related information, except
when the presentation of the content is "table-like". For "table-like" content,
markup typically enriches the content with presentation information. This
presenter does not believe that what is important about 95% of "table-like"
information is what it looks like. This presentation explains why tables
may not be a useful information category and discusses the pitfalls of the
currently popular approach of "Well, let's just use CALS tables.". The talk
proposes alternate approaches to capturing data that may ultimately be
presented as a table.
Jean Paoli, Technical Director, Grif S.A.
Multiple strategies for handling revision control in SGML can be envisioned:
the "a-posteriori" technique involves the comparison of newer and older
versions of a document, following modification. The "a-priori" technique,
by continuously tracking the modifications made to a document, makes it
possible to identify with a very fine degree of granularity, each successive
modification made to a document. This presentation examines in detail the
latter "a-priori" strategy and studies its implications in terms of the
User Interface. The presentation will detail Document-Oriented Interface
techniques for generating revision control information in two cases: a basic
case where different versions are generated and stored within a single SGML
document and a more advanced case where the versioning function of an
object-oriented database wired to an SGML Editor is used to store the
revision control information.
Bob Ducharme, Consultant
This presentation will discuss the similarities and mutually-exclusive
characteristics of SGML and object-oriented systems. It will examine the
common work of Dr. Charles Goldfarb, Grady Booch, and Charles Rumbaugh
as well as potential mutual benefits.
Eliot Kimber, SGML Architect and HyTime Analyst, Passage Systems
This presentation discusses the reasons why the SGML Link feature is not
only a good idea but a key aspect of SGML's protection of the rights of
data owners from the extortive tendencies of tool vendors. In addition,
the Link feature can make traditional SGML products more efficient. Mr.
Kimber gives an overview of link mechanisms and presents a proposed
convention for integrating link rules with typical style-based processors
such as editors and browsers. The presentation will show how the use of
Link can simplify style-based processors by providing early binding of
some style choices, thereby making product-specific style sheets simpler
and runtime processing more efficient. Finally, it will discuss the
relationship between Link and DSSSL and explains why the two mechanisms
are not in conflict.
Brad Chang, General Manager, Publishing Line of Business, Xsoft
This presentation will differentiate information creators, transformers and
producers within an organization and show how they will use SGML tools. It
will evaluate existing business systems and how they relate to the SGML
system. Mr. Chang will identify training requirements, define implementation
processes and focus on steps to ensure that your goals will be met.
Albert D'Andrea, Vice President, UniSQL
This session will discuss how a new genre of object-related database
technology can provide far improved data management support for SGML-based
document management systems and SGML publishing applications. The general
issues and technology that address today's complex document and multimedia
data modeling will be included.
Clive Carpi and Michelle Butler, InfoDesign Corporation
This informal session will use the most frequently asked questions about
SGML as a point of departure for a free-wheeling discussion.
Chair: Yuri Rubinsky
An informal session intended to draw out rant, cant and argument,
this 90 minutes is geared to those people for whom the basic questions
and answers are too basic -- but they still feel there are questions that
need addressing. A loose gaggle of experts will be lured into the room to
provide both targets and anchors.
Elaine Brennan and Tony Graham, ATLIS Consulting Group
Public SGML applications have been developed for a variety of industries.
The session will discuss what a public application contains and when and why
someone might use one.
Chair: Pam Gennusa, President, Database Publishing Systems Inc.
David Silverman, Chief Scientist, Innodata
SGML has revolutionized the way in which we view text information. However,
some of its core assumptions have slowed its acceptance and usefulness.
This presentation will describe ways in which these core assumptions can be
turned on their head, such as allowing DTD validation to be turned on and off
in a document including relevant formatting and display information in
documents to make SGML even more useful and harmonize it with the other
evolving standards.
Michael Leventhal, Vice President, Text Science, Inc.
This presentation will discuss where SGML should be by the year 2000. It
will include three different points of view: revision issues from those
involved in the review process, revisions from those that are not involved
in the process and from those that feel that there is something better than
SGML.
Sharon Adler and Anders Berglund, Electronic Book Technologies with
Steven Newcomb, President, TechnoTeacher and
Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb
Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL) is the newest
international standard in the family of SGML-related standards. Sharon and
Anders will cover the introductory concepts including the transformation
language and query. The character model will also be discussed. Areas of
commonality between DSSSL and HyTime will also be covered.
James Clark, Consultant
This talk will discuss some of the aspects of DSSSL that are hard to
understand just from reading the DSSSL standard. Topics in both the
transformation language and style language will be covered. This is
intended for those who need to acquire a detailed knowledge of DSSSL.
A basic knowledge of the DSSSL standard will be assumed.
Mark Gross, President, Data Conversion Laboratory
This presentation will warn against assuming too much when you convert
legacy documents to SGML. Because this is a new field, there might be
cost-effective conversion options that you have never heard of, and
data that you thought was impossible to convert might be convertible
after all. This presentation discusses a few composite case-studies
that incorporate such troublesome issues as tables and cross references.
It will also go over some general principles about how to analyze your
legacy documents and then how to analyze what you need from your target
documents in order to determine the best way to get there.
Bryan K. Caporlette, Manager, Applications Engineering,
Passage Systems
Many organizations which have adopted SGML have had to make a difficult
decision: switch to an SGML authoring system or filter their information
from a WYSIWYG authoring tool into a target document type definition
(DTD). This presentation will address the issues facing an organization
that has selected the latter solution. We will address the selection of
an authoring tool, how to develop a template geared for conversion into
a target DTD, issues facing developers writing a conversion environment
to perform the translation, and problems faced by the authors when
running the conversion filter. The presentation will provide practical
examples of pitfalls for conversion, and provide a frank representation
of what it takes to develop a robust, high-quality conversion environment.
Dale Waldt, Director of Publishing, Research Institute of America
This presentation will provide tips, techniques and recommended
practices for addressing information conversion. The discussion will
include a description of tools and their strengths and weaknesses,
resources, project planning, and a few tricks to make survival possible.
Several practical case studies will be used for illustration.
Steve Anderson, Project Manager, TiMS Project, Rover Group Limited
Based on a case study of introducing an SGML solution into a major
British manufacturer, this presentation will discuss the development
of a "Project Plan", describing from inception to delivery and beyond
the process of selling SGML through internal channels to a large company.
A sophisticated SGML-based Technical Information Management System (TiMS)
integrates all of the elements of a complete SGML solution. The need to
market the solution, to justify the rationale for this culture change, is
one of the key aspects of the internal selling process. This presentation
will also recommend a structured process for addressing the culture change,
aligned with the development and implementation activities more normally
associated with a systems development project.
Richard Barth, Director of Operations, Data Conversion Laboratory
Based on numerous actual conversions, this presentation emphasizes the
various technical and organizational problems that must be anticipated
as part of a conversion plan.
Cynthia N. Lee, Principal, Emerging Markets, Inc. and
William A. Barth, Principal, Strategic Visions, Inc.
This presentation will discuss the use of strategies beyond parameter
entities to produce a customized document. It will outline what happens
when the document production is many orders of magnitude more complex,
including and excluding text based upon a complex set of heuristics and
calculations. Examples from real-world problems and solutions will be
highlighted.
Sam Hunting, Information Architect, Martin Hensel Corporation
Large, dynamic publishing and electronic distribution environments have
great needs for efficient content processing yet have DTD requirements
that are open-ended. This presentation will describe how the Martin Hensel
Corp. has designed and implemented systems in which sophisticated
DTDs are easily produced from architectural form-based DTD fragments.
The advantages of this approach will be highlighted.
Mark Harmison, Technical Specialist/Project Manager, Xerox
Multinational Customer and Service Education
For the past 18 months Xerox has been implementing SGML-based delivery
of electronic documents. The development efforts have focused on using
SGML to enable "smart documents." This presentation will discuss the
following key areas of implementation: design and development of a
DTD-independent, multimedia viewer, tailored for procedural documents,
the development process used, technologies employed, issues faced, and
results of implementation in the field. This presentation will include
live demonstrations of the technologies and documents described.
Michael Leventhal, Vice President, Text Science
The Collaborative Environment for Language Learning (CELL), a completely
new application of SGML technology, is used for the text-centered multimedia
study of foreign languages. SGML plays a critical role in permitting the
language- and application-independent definition of a language-learning
database.
Keith Shafer, Senior Research Scientist, On-Line Computer Library
Center
This presentation describes the motivation and tools that have been built
to automatically create reduced structural representations of tagged text.
These tools are novel in that they let one use the basic tenets of SGML
without creating DTDs by hand. The presentation also describes the process
used to go from specific document instances to generalized grammars (DTDs).
Tim Prinzing, Senior Software Engineer, Fujitsu Network Transmission Systems
Fresco is a set of publicly-available remotable interfaces and a user
interface toolkit conforming to CORBA. Platform- and resolution-independent,
it supports structured graphics and direct manipulation of the user interfaces.
The work represents a newly-available way to have SGML objects that users can
interact with; for example, to create radically different views of the
same document.
Tim Bray, Vice President, Technology, OpenText
HyperText Markup Language, one of the bases of the World Wide Web, is
a strange beast indeed. It is a formatting language used for screen
presentation, but a poor one, lacking many of the features we have come
to expect in such systems. The main thrust of this talk will be a defense,
based on economics and illustrated by further examples from the Web Index
project, of the following strong proposition: "Any person or organization
planning any significant project involving the delivery of on-line documents
must first prove that HTML cannot be used before considering other
alternatives."
Eric van Herwijnen, Founder, NICE Technologies
EPSIG, in conjunction with NICE Technologies, has laid the groundwork
for a way to add structure to the World Wide Web. The Web is based on
HTML, a specific SGML DTD; however, its capacity for management and
display of large documents is virtually nonexistent. The publishers,
editors, and authors who already utilize ISO 12083 in their databases
can easily transfer their book length documents over the Internet, but
the time involved in downloading is extraordinary, reading a book on a
computer screen is unacceptable, and search capabilities are limited.
The structure of SGML, particularly that found in ISO 12083, is useless
today on the Internet. This presentation will discuss an approach which
will allow clients on the Web to access the structure of an SGML database
for search and retrieval, and then to present the information requested
in a user-friendly environment.
Dave Raggett, World Wide Web Consortium
This paper will review the design rationale for the next generation
of HTML, and describe how HTML3 meets the needs for a lingua franca for
the World Wide Web. Proprietary extensions to HTML have focused on stylistic
attributes, leading to worries about the long-term versatility of HTML.
The HTML3 specification has been carefully designed to exploit associated
style sheets and downloadable fonts. This, in association with mobile code,
will greatly expand the opportunities for publishing over the web. This
presentation will explain the relationship of the HTML table model to CALS,
and how HTML has been extended to handle math.
Eric Severson, Vice President, Market Strategy and Corporate
Development, Interleaf
Is HTML a blessing or a threat to SGML? If you have SGML, do you still
need HTML? Or should the question be asked in the opposite order? Technically
HTML is an SGML application, but the real issue will be decided by what
people will accept and the true nature of their requirements. Using humor
and analogy to explain the underlying technical issues, but then going on
to explore the real implications of these technologies, this presentation
provides important answers from both a developer's and manager's perspective.
It will show how both HTML and SGML by themselves fall short of the real
need, then go on to argue for a scaleable Web in which both formats coexist.
In this vision, HTML will continue to be the primary data format for the Web,
but generalized to form the backbone within which more sophisticated SGML
applications will also fit.
Neil Montgomery, Information Engineer and
Robert Fye, Vice President, General Manager, Aquidneck Management Associates, Ltd.
Aquidneck has been involved with supporting the US Navy's NAVAIR on
legacy F/A-18 data migration and IETM development in accordance with the
DoD Tri-service IETM specifications as part of a Phase II SBIR. An
IETM Validation, traversement and presentation engine to traverse and
present "smart" or "logic-enhanced" SGML that has been migrated from
legacy data and structured in accordance with the IETM Content Data
Model (CDM) generic and content-specific layers will be described in
detail.
Michael Gallagher, Director, Commercial Sales
and Marketing, Advanced Engineering and Research Associates, Inc.
This presentation will show multimedia computer-based training with
interactive software applications which were developed to be used with
interactive electronic technical manuals (IETMs). The demonstration will
discuss ways by which technical documentation that has been represented
electronically in SGML format may be enhanced by adding sound, video and
animation in addition to state of the art CBT. The presentation
will cover four areas: technical manual conversion and SGML tagged IETMs,
CBT/ICW planning and development, the integration of the two applications
into one cohesive training application, and issues relating to CD-ROM
publishing.
Peter Flynn, Consultant, Silmaril Consultants
Documents in the World Wide Web are intended primarily for on-screen
display. The HyperText Markup Language used is limited in power, but
still underutilized by implementors, and often written in a non-conferment
manner. This paper describes the development of a tool to produce
typeset (PostScript) output direct from valid, conferment instances
of HTML. While it handles some invalid but well-formed tags, the objective
is to demonstrate the power of making the markup work for the user as
well as to provide a useful means of improving the quality of printed output.
Tim Bray, Vice President of Technology, OpenText Corporation
HTML is an application of SGML. SGML is normally seen as a tool for
"descriptive" markup, aimed at structure rather than presentation; the
implication is that HTML can be used in this way. In general, it is not.
The data-structuring capabilities of HTML are not only limited, they
are often ignored or even seen as obstacles by HTML authors, who are
overwhelmingly concerned with the visual appeal of their creations.
Thus it is reasonable to ask: is there any need for document structures
in the context of the WWW? This talk will introduce the data structuring
capabilities of HTML and provide a frank discussion of their limitations
in theory and in actual usage. Mr. Bray will demonstrate the importance
of structural information in successful information retrieval and describe
alternative strategies for working with, around, and against the defacto
state of the WWW to gain some of the benefits of document structure.
Carla Corkern, President, Highland Consulting
This presentation discusses two ways of looking at industry-wide information
modeling. It suggests that there are good reasons why each industry makes
its own particular choices.
Paul Jensen, VP, Chief Information Officer, Research
Institute of America
A suggestion for keeping up with constant changes and improvements
in new technology. Instead of "riding the wave" of new technology
through its life and then catching the next wave, throwing out
much of the old system in the mean time, let's recognize that it
is time to view new technologies as steps on a ladder. New design
approaches like object orientation and open standards like SGML
provide organizations with a way to extend the life of their
technology investments. A financial model will be presented to help
explain and sell this approach to management. Techniques will be
reviewed that can help techies to design and implement a system
that will help them get to the next step up the ladder.
Jeff Suttor, SGML Architect and Software Engineer, Passage Systems
The need to perform SGML to SGML transformations is growing. This is the result of a maturing SGML marketplace and diverse toolset that supports native SGML. Just several years ago, the major questions were how to get non-SGML information into SGML (up-transformation), and out of SGML (down-transformation). Our community is now dealing with the transformation of large bodies of richly marked up SGML to interchange DTDs, application specific DTDs and simplified DTDs in support of simple or minimally SGML-aware applications. This presentation will discuss and compare four techniques for transforming SGML: custom programming, architectural forms, link process definitions and DSSSL STTP. The transformation of HTML to ICADD will be used as the example SGML source and target DTDs. All examples will be done using two common SGML parsing tools.
R. Alexander Milowski, President/Principle Researcher, Copernican
Solutions Incorporated
This presentation will explore the representation of traditional
application and storage formats as documents. In addition, it will
set the stage for a theory of documents as human-based information
representation and posit the argument that document-centered solutions
are inevitably more productive and protective of the information that
resides within.
Herman Kuiper, Numerical Mathematics and Application Programming
Department at the National Aerospace Laboratory of the Netherlands and
H. van der Ven, Numerical Mathematics and Application Programming Department
at the National Aerospace Laboratory of the Netherlands.
This presentation will describe how the HTML can be used to provide
information within a heterogeneous computing environment. The different
kinds of information that can be provided as well as an introduction to a
more interactive use of HTML through forms is given. During the development
of the information system a number of valuable lessons were learned
and will be shared.
Wayne Wohler, SGML Product Development Manager, IBM
This session will begin with a description of SGML declarations and their
description of document character sets, syntax character sets and the
relationship of the two. It will also cover the SGML system model, some
problems with it and some ideas for improving this model to support
double byte character sets. We will discuss the Extended Reference
Concrete Syntax to cover East Asian alphabets.
Murray Maloney, Product Manager, SoftQuad
Over the last two or three years, there has been an interesting and dynamic relationship emerging between and amongst the purveyors of SGML and HTML. Driven by a discerning market, SGML and HTML technology has been making rapid advances. Mr. Maloney will review some recent learning experiences and examine current and future SGML and HTML issues.
Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Editor, Text Encoding Initiative and Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago