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Re: Word of the day: upconversion

• From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>
• To: "'xml-dev@lists.xml.org'" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:01:13 -0400

At 2009-08-21 08:59 -0400, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
>Recently I read an article [1] by Michael Kay and learned a fabulous word:
>
>     upconversion
>
>The word originates in the broadcasting industry, where it is used 
>to mean the conversion of a low resolution image to an equivalent 
>high resolution image.
>
>In the XML world, the word refers to taking unstructured text and 
>adding structure (markup) to create a richer, structured document. 
>Here's how Michael Kay describes it:
>
>    Upconversion is the generation of a format
>    with detailed markup from a format with
>    less-detailed or no markup, where it is
>    necessary to generate the additional markup
>    by recognizing structural patterns that are
>    implicit in the textual content itself.

I believe in the SGML days the OmniMark folks used this term in 
association with their famous triangle diagram:  imagine a triangle 
with a point at the top center and a flat bottom.  At the bottom left 
point is labeled "unstructured source information", the line to the 
top point is labeled "up conversion" (going "up" the triangle), the 
top point is labeled "structured content", the line from the top 
point to the bottom right point is labeled "down conversion" (going 
"down" the triangle), the bottom right point is labeled "unstructured 
result information/rendering".

Thus the vertical axis of a graph on which the triangle is drawn 
would indicate going up as an increasing amount of structure in the 
information.

This illustrated the OmniMark product being used to take unstructured 
information, say legacy content, and make it into structured SGML and 
then convert the SGML into an unstructured result, say HTML.

I don't know if the triangle diagram originated at OmniMark, but that 
was the first place I saw it, and that was around 1990.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken


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• References:
  • Word of the day: upconversion
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>