[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML tools and big documents
Quoth David Megginson <david@m...>: > XML is for interchange -- for simple applications you can use it for > storage (as I do on my notebook), but for larger, multi-user > applications, you probably want to put it into some kind of > specialised storage, if only for the sake of revision and access > control. My interest in descriptive markup in general is in describing large, relatively static (meaning they don't get revised, usually), text collections: the many fine TEI or EAD encoding projects, for instance, the various literature collections one can get from Chadwyck-Healey, and the like (our shop here takes such things and indexes them with some version or other of OpenText for searching and structured retrieval). These are all described by SGML DTD's. I've seen discussion and work on making an XML DTD to correspond as closely as possible to the TEI, similarly with EAD. The kinds of documents these two DTD's can describe can be arbitrarily large (the average EAD finding aid is relatively small, but we have a couple pushing several megabytes). Are there then folks interested in XML for things other than interchange? Authoring, certainly, but also storage and retrieval of large text collections? To this end, I have been (in such spare time as i have) tinkering about with Mr. Clark's XP API (com.jclark.xml.tok, mostly) to write an application that will allow me to attach the logical element structure to offsets in the storage entity, so that I can consider the logical structure's relationship to points in the text without reparsing the document. I want to be able to ask questions like: "what's the most immediate containing element of offset X in file Y?" "traverse up the logical structure from offset X until a DIV element with a HEAD is found, and return me the offsets of that HEAD" Exact expression language is, uh, gee. These are the kinds of questions we could ask with "some XML query language", but if i have a gigabyte or so of variously-structured English text marked up this way, i really don't want to have to parse the document entity just to answer these kinds of simple questions. This is a weak specification of what I'm trying to do, i realize. (this all largely because i am disatisfied with the limited information of the logical tree that OpenText's sgmlrgnXX gives... ). Anyone else here interested in these kinds of problems, and using XML tools on them? Nigel Kerr nigelk@u... Digital Library Production Services http://www.umdl.umich.edu/ University of Michigan 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...)
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|