Consistent Electronic Publishing from Inconsistent Sources

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Consistent Electronic Publishing from
Inconsistent Sources

• Philip Mansfield
• Yuri Khramov
• Ahmet Gurcan
• Nov 17 XML 2004 Conference Washington, DC

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Advantages of XML-BasedContent Management

• Accessibility
• Consistent, organization-wide standards
• Integrate well with others
• Leverage widely-available XML tools
• Easily validate, re-purpose, combine, transform,
  style, search, and render

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Fantasy

• If I can just get my whole organization using
  the same XML-based authoring tools in the same
  way, then I will be able to build the ultimate
  enterprise-wide content management solution.

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Reality

• Every division acts autonomously
• People do not always read instructions, let alone
  follow them
• Native authoring tool formats continue to be
  binary, not XML
• Tool vendors preserve market share by making it
  difficult to migrate

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Up-Conversion

• Popular document formats do not encode structure
  at a useful semantic level
• e.g. HR department wants name, address, past
  jobs, degrees, publications, etc. from resumes.
  Yet these categories of text are
  indistinguishable in the submitted
  word-processing documents and PDF files
• Up-conversion is needed

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Requirements

• An effective content management solution
• should not assume anything about source formats
• should be highly flexible, adaptable and
  re-configurable over time
• should have strong up-conversion capabilities

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Solution

• Assemble content management solutions from a
  toolkit of useful components, not a monolithic
  application
• Use a pipeline architecture to manage data flow
  and order of execution of components
• The primary function of a component is to convert
  from one format to another

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Phases of Processing

• Extract
• Import all documents and data to XML
• Synthesize
• Up-convert and transform to a more useful form of
  XML
• Publish
• Export for the Web or print

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Cocoon

• The Apache Cocoon project provides one possible
  framework for pipelining conversion components,
  tailored for Web publishing
• Pipelines are defined in sitemap files
• Components can generate, transform or serialize
  XML
• A Cocoon-based content management system called
  Lenya is under development

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Use CaseData-Driven Graphics

• A business reporting system requires graphs and
  charts to be drawn on the fly from current data
• Data is variously available in Microsoft Excel
  files, database tables and XML

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Use CaseOnline Newspapers

• Articles from newspapers around the world are to
  be published as HTML pages
• Newspapers are available in PDF form
• The PDF file is to be augmented with hyperlinks
  to the HTML page for each article
• The articles are to be indexed by title, author,
  section, etc.

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Use CaseConference Proceedings

• Publish the XML 2004 conference papers as HTML,
  PDF and SVG
• Source documents are Microsoft Word files and
  DocBook XML files with links to SVG, PNG, GIF,
  JPEG and BMP files
• Index the papers by author, city, country,
  keyword, organization, time, title and track
• Provide cross-reference hyperlinks throughout

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ExtractPattern 1
ltgt lt/gt
generator
01 10
14
ExtractPattern 2
ltgt lt/gt
query
database
ltgt lt/gt
generator
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SynthesizePattern 1
ltgt lt/gt
profile
ltgt lt/gt
transformer
ltgt lt/gt
16
SynthesizePattern 2
XSLTgenerator
ltgt lt/gt
XSLTtransformer
ltgt lt/gt
17
SynthesizePattern 3
serializer
ltgt lt/gt
compiles
ltgt lt/gt
transformer
ltgt lt/gt
18
SynthesizePattern 4
ltgt lt/gt
transformer
batch process
01 10
serializer
transformer
ltgt lt/gt
19
PublishPattern 1
ltgt lt/gt
XSLT
01 10
XSL-FOserializer
XSLT transformer
ltgt lt/gt
PDF
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PublishPattern 2
ltgt lt/gt
XSLT
ltgt lt/gt
XMLserializer
XSLT transformer
ltgt lt/gt
XHTML SVG
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Demonstrations

• Data-driven graphics
• Online newspapers
• Conference proceedings

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References

• Cocoon Projecthttp//cocoon.apache.org/
• SchemaSoft Catwalkhttp//www.schemasoft.com/catwa
  lk/
• NewspaperDirecthttp//www.newspaperdirect.com
• SchemaSoft Word to DocBook Converterhttp//www.sc
  hemasoft.com/DocBook/
• XML 2004 Proceedingshttp//www.idealliance.org/pr
  oceedings/xml04/

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http//www.schemasoft.com