[Mirror from: http://www.doe.gov/html/osti/eei/reading/bdsgml94.html - Trip Report]

Trip Report

Introduction

SGML '94 is the second in the series of annual SGML conferences that I have attended. The conference is organized by the Graphic Communications Association (GCA) and is conducted annually. This year's conference was held in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. The conference, as in previous years, has doubled in growth annually; last years conference was attended by approximately 400 people and this years conference grew to 750 attendees. I was pleased to see a decidedly Department of Energy presence at this years conference; Idaho National Energy Laboratory, Argonne, Boeing Computer Services (Hanford), Battelle (Richland) to name a few, were seen among the attendees. The hotel, and the organizers, were not quite prepared for the large numbers that attended, but handled the additional numbers with finesse.

SGML '94 Highlights

Rather than provide a detailed account of the conference as a whole, I intend to address the highlights of the conference that I believe have relevance to the Department of Energy's Electronic Exchange Initiative.

Standard Generalized Markup Language and World-Wide-Web (WWW)

• Joseph Hardin, Program Director for National Center For Supercomputing Application's (NCSA) World-Wide-Web Mosaic, provided the key-note presentation for the conference. There were a number of items that were of have particular relevance to the Department of Energy's effort to make government information accessible by the public and the initiative to standardize the way in which Scientific and Technical Information is accessed and disseminated.

  Mr. Hardin made it very clear that NCSA intends to take WWW down the path of international standards. Future iterations of the WWW client Mosaic will include a browser that will allow the access, retrieval and viewing of fully compliant Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO - 8879) documents using any Document Type Definition. What this means to the Department of Energy and the Electronic Exchange Initiative is that we will now have the capability to access and view Scientific and Technical Information over the Internet in the way that author intended the information to be presented; complex document structures, multiple graphic formats, complex hyperlink schemes, mathematics, chemistry, tables and scientific notation based upon international standards will now be accessible and viewable. Unlike the current Hypertext Markup Language DTD, where only one simple document structure is possible, this new capability, combined with the Departments Technical Reports DTD, will open the way to full expression of our information over the Internet.

  Mr. Hardin also cited some interesting statistics during the keynote address. He indicated that if the traffic on the Internet increases at its current pace, it will exceed that of telephonic voice traffic in three years. He also described some additional functionality that will not only improve the feasibility of SGML on the Internet, but will provide an infrastructure for commercialized publishing on the net. These improvements include improved security features, the addition of a means for tracking "digital Cash" for commercial transactions, and improvements in access and retrieval.

• The advantages and disadvantages of this innovation may be depicted in a matrix, as follows:

FUNCTION               HTML.DTD       REPORTS.DTD
        
Graphics Formats           GIF                 BMP,TIF,WCM,GIF
        
Complex Document
Structures                 NO                  YES

Complex Hyperlink
Paths                      NO                  YES

International
Standard                   NO                  YES

Use any DTD                NO                  YES

ISO Standard for
Special Characters,
Math, Chemistry            NO                  YES

Tables                     NO                  YES

New Standard Generalized Markup Language Tools

• The significance of the announcements by the two major wordprocessing producers in the world to market SGML authoring software is evident. Both MicroSoft and WordPerfect have both announced SGML editing software that will be bundled with their mainstream wordprocessing software. It appears that these products will be accessible in terms of pricing as well. It should not be a surprise to find that these products will be available in the $200.00 range. The trend now seems to be, within the SGML vendor community, to produce affordable, easy-to-use application software making SGML accessible technically and economically.
• MicroSoft has announced its new SGML product which will be bundled with MS Word. The product is called SGML Author for MS Word and allows a user to produce SGML documents without extensive training or expertise.
• WordPerfect will be releasing in FY '95 the WordPerfect SGML Edition 2.0 for Windows. This SGML application also keeps the technical SGML environment behind the scenes and like the MS Word product, allows the user to start creating SGML encoded documents without a lot of additional training. The Office of Scientific and Technical Information is on the list to be a Beta test site for this software.
• Avalanche SGML application software is currently being bundled in a number of the major wordprocessing and electronic publishing software packages to facilitate SGML processing.
• Eric Van Herwijnen and Nice Technologies now have available an SGML authoring environment call Tag Wizard. This software may be used with either MS Word or WordPerfect.

Systems

• A continuing debate here, as elsewhere, concerns imaging versus encoded ASCII or structure oriented solutions. Tim Bray, President and Founder of Open Text databases, made the useful distinction between "live" and "dead" data. Live data refers to data that is changeable in terms of content and appearance, as well as being able to reference other information resources, such as databases and documents. Dead data refers to "static" data or those typically found in imaged documents; once the information is frozen in an image, it essentially stays there. In terms of being able to reuse, or get at the content of "dead" imaged documents, additional processing, time and resources are required. The static data paradigm's single most attractive feature is that it is cheap, but in terms of viewability, usability of the information and as a solution amenable to wide area dissemination of information, because of constraints in band-width, it's utility diminishes. From an information organization's perspective, creating documents that are Dead On Arrival may be a short term solution, but in the long term, the life cycle management of information, reusability and accessibility over time must be primary considerations.

Other Projects and Initiatives

• The Department of Education is currently conducting studies to implement SGML for internal documentation.
• The Air Transport Association's DTD has been adopted by United Airlines and Lufthansa.
• Pinnacles (the consortium of semiconductor producers) and IBM have new DTD's.
• The Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL) is being voted upon as an international standard.
• ISO 13673, on SGML conformance testing, has been approved and the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) is establishing a conformance testing project.
• The drug regulatory agencies of Canada, the United States, Sweden, Australia, and the Netherlands are creating standardized DTDs for Chemistry Submissions. They have identified DTD finalization, format, instance markup, prototype development and demonstrations are their next task.
• An effort to create a Universal Text Format for on-line, broadcast, print, and archival news is being coordinated by a joint committee of the International Press Telecommunications Council and the Newspaper Association of America.
• The Maximum Security Federal Women's Prison in Louisville Kentucky is tagging documents for the Library of Congress' American Memory project.
• Ira Goldstein, co-chair of the recent World-Wide-Web Conference, who, in his remarks to the assembly simply took as a given that the future of the Web would be tied to SGML.

Government Printing Office Visit

I arranged a visit to the Government Printing Office and invited Shannon Savage, Argonne, and Theresa Squires, Idaho National Energy Laboratory, and Norm Smith to attend as well. Mr. Jim Byers, Chief, In-House Applications Section , had graciously invited me to GPO to discuss his efforts in implementing SGML at the GPO. GPO first used SGML as part of a Congressional Record CD-ROM pilot project during 1990-1991. Their goal in the adoption of SGML was to determine if they could build a more context sensitive retrieval capability and to use a single source file for the creation of paper and electronic documents.. With the success of that project and the enaction of the GOP Electronic Access Act of 1993, GPO embarked upon providing a system of online access to the Congressional Record, the Federal Register and other appropriate publications. In addition, as required by this act, they will maintain an electronic directory of Federal electronic information as well as operate a facility for Federal electronic information. GPO has, in fact, developed Document Type Definitions (DTDs) for the Federal Register and Congressional Record and will be ready to implement and make available these rather voluminous and daily published documents (greater than a Megabyte each) in paper and electronic format this fiscal year.

Training continues to be a critical component of their strategy for implementation. GPO has developed a training program that consists of a general introduction as well as a Data Analysis and Element Tagging section using SGML. GPO does not plan to stop with the Federal Register and the Congressional Record; their intent is to make SGML their publishing standard which means that contracting organizations will be expected to provide their information encoded in SGML as well.

Bottom line with GPO is that they see the use of SGML as a means of "faster and more cost effective production of multiple information products and easier interchange of documents into or across different environments".

Conclusion

The growth of SGML '94 is indicative of the continued and expanding interest in SGML in government and private industry. It has provided an opportunity to receive first hand exposure to new technical developments and trends in the vendor community and implementors in both the private and government sectors.