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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: EMBED and validation
 At 01:25 30/11/97 +0200, Gerard Freriks wrote: >As an outsider I follow the discussions about the topic. Welcome Gerard, We do not have 'outsiders' here :-). We welcome the diversity and crossfertilisation from other disciplines. > I was invited to a Drug Information Association mtg 2 weeks ago about e-submissions for new drugs. There was a lot of excitement about XML. :-) >Within Health CAre I forsee a need to achieve the following: I assume you are familiar with the HL7 effort - I believe they are seriously thinking of using XML. >- there will be one Universal DTD (or whatever) >- based on this one DTD users will select portions of it to construct messages >- these messages might contain other messages or references to it >- depending on circumstances decided upon by the user he might or might not >want to view the whole collection of data as one piece (merged) or as data >plus references >- messages will be added to a receiving master patient record and either be >shown as references or merged. I think this is a very general concern among the XML/SGML community. A useful concept is 'information objects' or 'DTD fragments' [please correct me if these are not identical :-)]. Essentially they are 'Pick-N-Mix' DTDs, which you combine for your own purposes. Thus in submitting a new drug, you have to submit clinical records, manufacturing processes, personal data, documents, safety, statistics, and (yes) chemistry. IMO it is impossible to create a single DTD that covers all of this. These are all different and complex disciplines and it is much better to re-use the work that people who are experts have done. (So, gratifyingly, there was interest in using CML for drug submissions.) I would therefore strongly advise people not to develop a multidiscipline DTD at present without looking carefully at what is being done by the specialist communities. That may even extend to textual passages (at least for technical documents). For example I use XMLised HTML for all my chemical stuff rather than invent my own <PARA>, <TITLE>, etc. The technical problem of how these are combined in any given document is a very active concern of the W3C and related community. The problem is that if you simple combine all the relevant DTDs you will get name clashes. E.g. <A> means anchor for HTML, may mean Answer for someone else, may mean Author for another. If these are blindly combined, the validation will fail (DavidD has pointed this out clearly). Two current XML ways to get round this are: XLL, where sections from different DTDs are XML-LINKed, rather than being merged or included via entities. If the two components are to be jointly displayed or otherwise combined the application has to be quite flexible. JUMBO does this by using different java.awt.Frames to display them. Namespaces. the W3C/XML community is investigating namespaces as a way of tackling this. There are no firm recommendations yet, so treat this with great caution. The formal position is (XML 2.3) that 'the colon character is [...] reserved for experimentation with name spaces'. So, if JUMBO (which is nothing if not experimental :-) is given two elements <MathML:VAR> and <CML:VAR> it knows they are different and can also link to different 'schema' files which will tell you about the different namespaces (and will enable namespace-dependent display). > >So which way you organise it, I don't mind. > >And Oh Yes. >We in medicine count upon the fact that all DTD's and subDTD's will be >stored in an Internet repository. Absolutely essential. The curation of DTDs and semantics (e.g through terminology) is a critical part of markup. Most DTDs are semantically void (the semantics are added through prose) and this worries me. I therefore see the need for additional representation of semantics in machine-readable form, and XML is the obvious format. Therefore JUMBO is able to read 'schemas' (which use DTD information if available) and include help, datatyping, etc. P. Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic net connection VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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