XML: Modeling Data and Metadata

Rohit Khare & Adam Rifkin, 4K Associates

Presentations


Registration

This tutorial will be presented on Sunday morning, November 15, 1998 at the Westin Seattle as part of ACM CSCW'98.


Goals & Objectives

Designers of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work systems have long sought a portable information delivery format to share knowledge. Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides an effective solution for communicating across time, space, and communities. First, when recording a data structure for future reuse, XML format storage is self-descriptive enough to extract its schema and verify its validity. Second, when transferring data structures between different machines, XML's link model in conjunction with Web transport protocols reduces the burden of marshaling entire data sets. Third, when sharing collaborative data structures between disparate communities, it is easier to compose new systems and convert data definitions to the degree that XML documents are well-adapted to the Web.

Intense market interest in Web publishing has imparted considerable momentum to XML and its entire family of related specifications -- not just for modeling documents, but meta-data as well. To date, there are efforts to exchange XML-based metadata for authoring and versioning, content-rating, searching and indexing, content rating, XML grammars and more. Many are based on the generic Resource Description Framework (RDF) under development at the World Wide Web Consortium or on proposals for XML Schemas such as XML-Data.

This tutorial introduces the family of Extensible Markup Language specifications to CSCW researchers and practitioners: XML, Namespaces, XML Stylesheet Language (XSL), XLink, XPointer, RDF (Resource Description Framework), and Schemas, as well as its interaction with other Web standards such as HTML, CSS, URI, and HTTP.

Content & Activities

This tutorial is structured around several presentations on aspects of the Extensible Markup Language interspersed with interactive Q&A and design walkthroughs of bibliographic citations, memos, and a scenario offered by participants.

Audience

This session is intended for CSCW developers evaluating the XML family of standards. No prior knowledge of markup languages, metadata systems, or knowledge representation is assumed, though broad familiarity with Web technologies is helpful.

Qualifications

Rohit Khare joined the Ph.D. program in computer science at the University of California, Irvine in Fall 1997 to focus on the development of Internet application protocols and standardization. He was previously on the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT and later at MCI Internet Architecture, as well as serving as editor-in-chief of the World Wide Web Journal at O'Reilly & Associates. Rohit received a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science and in Economics from California Institute of Technology in 1995.

Adam Rifkin received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is presently pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science at the California Institute of Technology, where he works with the Caltech Infospheres Project on the composition of distributed active objects. His efforts with Infospheres have won best paper awards both at the Fifth IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing and at the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. He has performed research and consulting for organizations such as Microsoft Research, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Griffiss Air Force Base, and the NASA-Langley Research Center.

Together, they have authored several papers on the origins, applications, and implications of XML which are available at http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/xml.


Copyright 1998, 4K Associates. All rights reserved. May be used only for educational and personal purposes without written consent of the authors.