Hands-on Introduction to XML Design, Deployment and Delivery
Marc Moens

1 Day Seminar: 23 November 1999

1. Scope and Purpose

XML offers tremendous promise as the packaging and transfer mechanism of choice for the information age. Designing, authoring and/or automatically generating, warehousing and distributing XML documents will be at the heart of every Internet-connected business in the very near future.

This seminar will introduce you to the standards and the technology which are making this possible. In every case a concrete example-based introduction will include hands-on experience.

2. Who Should Attend

If you need to design and supervise or carry out the introduction of XML into your company, this seminar is for you. It will help you to

Managers, analysts and programmers concerned with documents, document management and information within IT, computing, office systems and corporate publishing departments in all sectors will benefit.

3. Outline Contents
3.1. Document Management Systems

Document management standards and bodies: Shamrock, Document Enabled Networking, Document Management Alliance. Object Technology (ActiveX, DCOM; Java, CORBA) and its role in document management (object-oriented databases, OpenDoc). Structured documents. Annotation standards and the alphabet soup: SGML, HTML, XML. Related standards: STEP, CALS.

3.2. Basic XML

The history of SGML, HTML and XML. Overview of the XML standard. Separating structure and appearance. Identifying types of documents. Hands-on exercises in simple document markup and DTD development.

3.3. Documents in Databases

XML tools for authoring, editing, transformation, conversion. Advantages of structured documents. Overview of document databases.

3.4. Documents working together

An introduction to hyperlinking: The XLink and XPointer standards. Links are not just for clicking: Using links to manage your data. Hands-on exercises in linking.

3.5. Summary conclusions

What should your company be doing about deploying XML?

4. The Tutorial Presenters

Marc Moens is Senior Research Fellow and Manager of the Edinburgh Language Technology Group, has over 15 years experience in language processing and document handling work. He has played a key part in projects involving the creation of text routing and document classification tools; the development of authoring tools for controlled languages; and information extraction from documents.

Henry S. Thompson is Reader in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh, where he is chiefly engaged in research and research management in the Language Technology Group of the Human Communication Research Centre. He has published several language research corpora on CD-ROM, and has developed software systems for SGML and DSSSL. He was a member of the original W3C SGML Working Group, responsible for the first drafts of the XML standard. He was a co-author of the XML-Data proposal and the original XSL proposal and is now a member of the XSL working group and the XML Schema working group. He is the author of XED, the first freely available XML editor.