Member Presentation Day

Member Presentation Day
Tuesday 27 June 2006
Reading Town Hall
Blagrave Street, Reading, Berkshire RG1 1QH

We are pleased to announce the full programme for this event, which promises to be another varied and interesting day. To register, download the registration form.

The Programme

The programme will be organised roughly as follows, BUT MAY BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.

The Venue
Reading Town Hall is within 5 minutes’ walk from Reading railway station, with excellent national rail connections.

Registration
Registration fees (including lunch) are:

• £60 per person for full XML UK, ISUG and EPSG members (maximum two persons representing a corporate member)
• £85 per additional person for corporate members
• £110 for non-members
• £45 for student members

Summaries of Presentations

Information Modelling Toolkit: XForms without Tears
Antony Scott and Bilal Baig, CSW Informatics
The Information Modelling Toolkit (IMTK) has been developed by CSW Informatics to as a module for online forms generation for CSW’s Case Notes electronic healthcare records management system. The toolkit is an XSLT-driven pipeline with a Microsoft Excel user interface, with an output set including XML schemas, sample instances, XForms, Case Notes Smart Forms, and import and configuration scripts. Its goal is to allow Clinical Analysts to design and specify forms using an enhanced Excel interface, previewing the results to allow multiple iterations before deployment. Powered by Cocoon, its outputs have been deployed in a client-side XForms environment on PCs and PDAs as well as to Case Notes itself.

Universal Business Language and W3C XML Schema: Lessons learned
Stephen Green, SystML
The speaker will present the lessons learned in producing schemas for the OASIS Universal Business Language in the use of W3C XML Schema for an international content-based XML Industry Standard. As chair of the UBL Software Subcommittee Stephen Green has particular responsibility for ensuring schemas are generated from models according to Naming and Design Rules and meet expectations for customisation and versioning. The design of these schemas has been a result of extensive efforts over sevaral years within an OASIS Technical Committee and the design has spawned other similar efforts raised to high profile internationally. There have been limits to what could be achieved with W3C Schema, despite intense pressure from many to keep to that standard. As a result a second stage of validation, a second layer, has been advocated using such standards as Schematron and possibly NVDL, both ISO Standards. On the other hand there has been much optimisation of the W3C Schema design needed to ensure possibilities of this standard too for customisation and minor versioning can be achieved.

The Datatype Library Language (DTLL)
Alex Brown, Griffin Brown
The speaker will introduce this new language, which is part of DSDL, and will present the latest news from the recent ISO meeting in Korea on the state of development of DTLL, Alex will also demonstrate a working partial Open Source DTLL implementation.

Making DTDs namespace- and datatype-aware
Francis Cave
Many XML users still have legacy systems that continue to work well with DTDs. If these systems are to take full advantage of namespaces and datatypes, must they re-engineer their systems to use XML Schema or RELAX NG? DSDL Part 9 aims to provide a partial solutions for DTD users, although some re-engineering of DTD parsers looks to be unavoidable. The speaker will describe what is proposed to include in DSDL to support continued use of DTDs, and will provide an update on the state of development.

Creating an XML Data Firewall
Eamonn Neylon, Griffin Brown
Inter-organization data transfer using XML is now commonplace, with many companies mandating the supply of data in XML. But how can recipients of XML data ensure that what they get matches their expectations? It is one thing to ask that supplied data conforms to a specification, but another to prove that the data is correct as opposed to merely being schema compliant. This talk looks at the desirable checks that specification writers intend to have performed on data, and considers how these can be codified within software.

The flow of data between organizations can be marshalled using quality as the routing mechanism. By locating problems in content at an early stage in its creation, it is possible to realise benefits from the use of XML as a data format.

Conversion from Legacy typesetting formats
Graham Every
The speaker will discuss the issues in the complete conversion from RTF to XML. It focuses on the initial setup of the requirements as well as ongoing parameters. What is convertible? What can be automated? How much money will it cost? How can you ensure success? The speaker will draw on his 20 years’ experience in the conversion field, covering large scale conversion projects as well as ones that are used daily.

Expressing intellectual property licensing terms in XML
Steffen Lindek, Rightscom
As the number of digital resources in library collections grows, libraries have increasing difficulty in complying with the widely differing licensing terms applied to resources by their creators and publishers. The ability to express these terms in a standard XML format, link them to the digital resources and communicate them to users has become a pressing need with benefits to both publishers and libraries.

The speaker will present the development of a standard, ONIX for Licensing Terms, for the communication of licensing terms for digital resources from a publisher to a user institution, to enable the licensing terms to be loaded into, and applied by, an electronic resource management system. Design principles for this standard, which is based on a generic ontological structure for rights, are described and illustrated using a sample publisher license.

Prize Draw
Thanks to the folks at DataDirect Technologies, we will be making a Prize Draw at 15.45, immediately before the AGM.

The draw will be for several licenses to Stylus Studio, the XML Integrated Development Environment. For more information on Stylus Studio visit http://www.stylusstudio.com. The winners of the Prize Draw will be able to choose between activation keys for each of the following:

• 5-user license for Stylus Studio Professional Edition (1 key)
• single-user license for Style Studio Enterprise Edition (2 keys)

All members who attend the AGM will be entered into this draw.

NB there is no fee for members to attend the AGM, but we hope that members will wish to attend the Member Presentation Day that precedes it.