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adding semantics to CALS tables?

• From: "DuCharme, Bob (LNG)" <bob.ducharme@l...>
• To: 'xml-dev' <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 15:12:09 -0400

The DTD declarations for CALS tables (right now I'm looking at the "DocBook
XML CALS Table Model V4.1.2" ones included with DocBook) are remarkably
presentation-oriented: frame, rowsep, colsep, align, colwidth, etc. These
are all fine and useful attributes, but I'll bet that people out there have
modified these declarations to add more semantics about the data in their
tables, and I wanted to ask about your experiences. 

Perhaps you added some basic data typing, so that you could specify that a
given column held currency figures. Did you give it a way to specify which
currency? How? Perhaps you added a "machine readable" way to name semantics,
so that a processing program that saw one column with "Gross Revenue" in its
thead entry and another with "Revenue, Gross" in its thead entry knew that
they had the same meaning because of the string "GROSSREV" stored in a
corresponding place for both of columns. 

Did you specify semantics by adding new attributes to the colspec element,
or the entry element, or did you specify this metainformation using RDF? Did
any particular off-the-shelf software used to create, process, and store
these tables make this modification easier or harder?

According to OASIS Technical Memorandum TM 9502:1995, the "CALS Table Model
Document Type Definition,"[1] "the model is not well-defined without the
accompanying natural language description of the semantics (meanings) of
these various elements, attributes, and attribute values." Natural language
is better than nothing, but I want something that a processing program can
use. 

I'm looking forward to hearing about any experiences. 

Bob DuCharme            www.snee.com/bob             <bob@  
snee.com>      see http://www.snee.com/bob/xsltquickly for
info on new book "XSLT Quickly" from Manning Publications.

[1]http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/a502.htm

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