Chapter 16 - XML-Derived Markup Languages

Abstract

This chapter review a number of specialized Extensible Markup Language (XML) languages and express a few thoughts about the ways in which documents built using those vocabularies might be queried. It also discusses discovering things like web services that are businesses from which purchasing and selling can be done and XML vocabularies that helps in exploring query information. XML is used for more than merely exchanging data and documents, or storing them. It is the foundation for a very large number of specialized XML vocabularies, some of which have very large communities of users and some of which are narrowly focused. The chapter explores a small number of specialized XML vocabularies and considers whether they would benefit from having a custom query language that could be used by their user communities. In most cases, either there was no great motivation to query the marked-up data (at least not enough to support development, standardization, and implementation of specialized query languages), or the obvious solution was to query the data using XQuery (or an application based on XQuery). XQuery is a good base for querying anything that is represented as XML. Specialized XML languages may motivate specialized query languages, but it is suspected that they would probably be based on XQuery. The other topics discussed are MathML that is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and enables mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web content; Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) that is a markup language published by the W3C to integrate a set of independent multimedia objects into a synchronized multimedia presentation; and (Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an XML markup language, used for representing graphics that can be displayed over the web with whatever resolution the destination medium can support.