XSLT Stylesheets Research Articles

RiC-O Converter: A Software to Convert EAC-CPF and EAD 2002 XML Files to RDF Datasets Conforming to Records in Contexts Ontology

RiC-O Converter is an open source command-line tool to convert EAD finding aids and EAC-CPF authority records to RDF files conforming to ICA Records in Contexts ontology (RiC-O) in a robust manner. It was developed for the Archives nationales of France but is aimed to be reused by other archival institutions, and to this aim is fully documented in English. It is based on XSLT stylesheets that consider the variability of EAD content. It enabled the Archives nationales of France to convert 15,400 EAC-CPF files and 31,000 EAD files into a homogeneous knowledge graph, and to start a more specific project aiming to provide end users with an intuitive search interface for a significant subset of this graph, opening new perspectives for navigating and linking from/to archival metadata.

Textmodellierung und Analyse von quasi-hierarchischen und varianten Liturgika des Mittelalters

Abstract The Digital Humanities project ‘CANTUS NETWORK. Libri ordinarii of the Salzburg metropolitan province’ undertakes research around the liturgy and music of the churches and monasteries of the medieval ecclesiastical province of Salzburg. Key sources are the liturgical ‘prompt books’, called libri ordinarii, which include a short form of more or less the entire rite of a diocese or a monastery. The workflow of the project is set in an environment called GAMS, a humanities research data repository built for long-term storage and presentation of data coming from the humanities. Digital editions of the libri ordinarii of the province were generated with the aim of enabling a comparative analysis of the various different traditions. As a first step, the books were transcribed with strict rule-based tags in Microsoft Word and transformed to TEI using the community’s XSLT stylesheets and a Java-based script. Subsequently, Semantic Web technologies were deployed to foster graph-based search and analysis of the structured data. Possible future work on the topic is facilitated by the dissemination of content levels as Linked Open Data. Further analysis is conducted with the help of Natural Language Processing methods in order to find text similarities and differences between the libri ordinarii.

Beyond validation: Using programmed diagnostics to learn about, monitor, and successfully complete your DH project

Abstract Digital humanities projects have long relied on various schema languages—chiefly, RELAX NG and Schematron—for validating the XML documents in their data collections; however, these languages are limited in their ability to check for consistency, coherence, and completeness across the entire project. In our work as part of “Endings”, an umbrella project that comprises four diverse digital edition projects from different fields, we have developed a methodology for checking and enforcing correctness, completeness, and coherence across the entire document set. The following article describes the various stages (what we term “levels”) of our diagnostics process, all of which are driven by XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) stylesheets, and produce a human readable report. These levels include checks for referential integrity, correct entity tagging, and potential duplicates in the data set. Using examples from the Endings projects, we show how diagnostic processes not only ensure correctness in the data set, but can also aid in determining project milestones and completion dates. Diagnostics, we argue, are thus a crucial extension to schema-based validation for complex digital projects and can provide concrete ways for digital humanities projects to enforce coherence and consistency and track their progress toward completion.

The Use of HL7 Clinical Document Architecture Schema to Define a Data Warehouse Dimensional Model for Secondary Purposes

This paper proposes a semi-automatic approach to extract information stored in a HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and transform them to be loaded in a Data Warehouse for secondary purposes. It represents a suitable solution to facilitate the design and implementation of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools that are considered the most time-consuming step of the data warehouse development process. The implementation of this framework is also proposed adopting the XSLT style sheet language that converts an original CDA XML-based document to an output XML document that can be easily loaded in the Data Warehouse. A case study is also provided to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach proposed.

Transformation of Arden Syntax's medical logic modules into ArdenML for a business rules management system.

Arden Syntax is a Health Level Seven International (HL7) standard language that is used for representing medical knowledge as logic statements. Arden Syntax Markup Language (ArdenML) is a new representation of Arden Syntax based on XML. Compilers are required to execute medical logic modules (MLMs) in the hospital environment. However, ArdenML may also replace the compiler. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that MLMs, encoded in ArdenML, can be transformed into a commercial rule engine format through an XSLT stylesheet and made executable in a target system. The target rule engine selected was Blaze Advisor. We developed an XSLT stylesheet to transform MLMs in ArdenML into Structured Rules Language (SRL) in Blaze Advisor, through a comparison of syntax between the two languages. The stylesheet was then refined recursively, by building and applying rules collected from the billing and coding guidelines of the Korean health insurance service. Two nurse coders collected and verified the rules and two information technology (IT) specialists encoded the MLMs and built the XSLT stylesheet. Finally, the stylesheet was validated by importing the MLMs into Blaze Advisor and applying them to claims data. The language comparison revealed that Blaze Advisor requires the declaration of variables with explicit types. We used both integer and real numbers for numeric types in ArdenML. "IF∼THEN" statements and assignment statements in ArdenML become rules in Blaze Advisor. We designed an XSLT stylesheet to solve this issue. In addition, we maintained the order of rule execution in the transformed rules, and added two small programs to support variable declarations and action statements. A total of 1489 rules were reviewed during this study, of which 324 rules were collected. We removed duplicate rules and encoded 241 unique MLMs in ArdenML, which were successfully transformed into SRL and imported to Blaze Advisor via the XSLT stylesheet. When applied to 73,841 outpatients' insurance claims data, the review result was the same as that of the legacy system. We have demonstrated that ArdenML can replace a compiler for transforming MLMs into commercial rule engine format. While the proposed XSLT stylesheet requires refinement for general use, we anticipate that the development of further XSLT stylesheets will support various rule engines.

Easy tools to get to grips with linguistic variation in the manuscripts of <i>Njáls saga</i>.

The project The Variance of Njals saga examines variation in the sixty-three medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of Njals saga from a linguistic, philological, and literary perspective. This saga is the most extensive of the Icelandic family sagas and is thought to have been composed around 1280. The following article describes methods used in the project to identify synchronic variation at a linguistic level in the fourteenth century manuscripts of the saga, and aspects of an analysis of the stemmatic relationship between manuscripts. In both fields the development of computer-based approaches has advanced notably in the last few years. However, affordable solutions customised for end-users are still lacking. The project therefore focuses on easy tools that can be applied in a short-term project with limited financial and human resources. The manuscripts are transcribed according to the conventions of MENOTA (Medieval Nordic Text Archive) in TEI-XML; a segmentation allowing for an identification of corresponding contents is added; linguistic features relevant for an examination of variation are tagged; and structures relevant for a comparison are displayed for further analysis with the help of XSLT-style sheets. The article discusses challenges that lie in the peculiarities of medieval writing (non-standardised orthography, abbreviations) and tries to outline practicable solutions. Initial results of comparisons of manuscripts based on this approach show variation not only in the semantic domain (substitution of words), but also in the syntactic domain (change of word order, usage of different syntactical constructions).

A Fine-Grained Access Control Approach for Parts Resource Sharing

To meet users’ actual demands for fine-grained access control (FGAC) to data object in web-based parts resource sharing platform, a FGAC approach for parts resource sharing is proposed to enable both the providers and administrators to manage the permissions of parts resource jointly. In this approach, all levels of detail (LODs) are introduced in the part resource information firstly. Then, a role-based access control model for parts resource sharing, called RBAC_PRS, is provided on the basic of RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and O-RBAC (Owners-Based Access Control) models, and the permission administration policy is also formulated in condition of the separation between ownership and usufruct of parts resource. To provide the better authorization route, two middle layers: function sets and component sets, are added in permission-role assignment process, and each role’s assignment rules are explicitly specified in an XSLT style sheet. Furthermore, an XML-XSLT based approach is adopted to accomplish the diversity expression of user-accessible view based on FGAC. And it could ensure to practice the web-based knowledge sharing system safely.

Building Linguistic Corpora from Wikipedia Articles and Discussions

Wikipedia is a valuable resource, useful as a lingustic corpus or a dataset for many kinds of research. We built corpora from Wikipedia articles and talk pages in the I5 format, a TEI customisation used in the German Reference Corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus DeReKo). Our approach is a two-stage conversion combining parsing using the Sweble parser, and transformation using XSLT stylesheets. The conversion approach is able to successfully generate rich and valid corpora regardless of languages. We also introduce a method to segment user contributions in talk pages into postings.

Using a Common Model: Mapping VRA Core 4.0 Into an RDF Ontology

Linked Data has become a very important way to share information on the Web. The Visual Resource Association (VRA) Core 4 eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema was used as a basis for developing a new VRA ontology that was highly interoperable across the Web. Once the model was developed, an eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) style sheet was created to test the model against an actual VRA Core 4 data set. The study successfully demonstrated how popular and widely consumed vocabularies can be used to form the basis for more granular vocabularies. The study also demonstrated how existing data can be successfully converted into Resource Description Framework (RDF) using an XSLT style sheet.

Mapping Process of Relational Data to OWL Class Instances using XSLT

Ontologies are widely used in many domains and evolve as domains change [7]. From the other side, the relational database technology has ensured the best facilities for storing, updating and manipulating the information of problem domain. We propose in this paper a transformation process from existing data in relational databases into OWL class instances using XSLT. This process allows us to mapping some constraints on columns such as foreign key while maintaining semantic constraints. Our approach start by translate the relational data into adequate XML document conforming to a suitable XML schema. Since our process is based on XSLT Stylesheets, its transformation rules can be modified in a very flexible manner in order to consider different mapping strategies and future requirements.

Mapping Process of Relational Schema to OWL Ontologies using XSLT

One of the challenges of the semantic Web is to integrate the information already available on the standard Web, usually stored in relational databases. We propose in this paper a transformation process from existing relational database schema defined by a set of tables into OWL ontologies using XSLT. This process allows us to mapping some constraints on columns such as primary key, foreign key, unique, not null. Our approach start by translate the database schema into a XML document validate by a suitable XML schema. Since our process is based on XSLT stylesheets, its transformation rules can be modified in a very flexible manner in order to consider different mapping strategies and requirements.

CroALa

Croatiae auctores Latini (CroALa), a text collection first published in 2009, makes freely accessible Latin texts written by or about people of Croatian origin from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The collection is intended primarily for scholars of Latin and neo-Latin literature and language and of Croatian history and culture. Texts are encoded in TEI XML and made searchable and readable online using PhiloLogic. This edition is intended to become a starting point and a useful tool for serious research, both traditional and digital. What can be done, besides adding more texts, to stimulate such research? This article describes the editors’ solutions in the following six areas: fine-tuning the metadata and user interface to enable grouping of texts by author, period, genre, theme; providing language tools for users; adding supplemental material and links; making citations of CroALa texts easier and providing hyperlinks between texts; digitizing and providing access to finding aids for effective search and retrieval; disseminating the texts in outside repositories. These enhancements are realized by XML encoding, XSLT stylesheets, and configuring PhiloLogic. These solutions are simple to implement and are within reach of an advanced, non-programmer computer user. The documentation of these solutions serves a twofold pedagogical purpose: first, to help newcomers find their way around the immense potential enabled by the TEI encoding scheme and, second, to encourage other humanities scholars to become makers—or, at least, adapters—of TEI-based digital tools. Simply put, if I did it, you can do it too!

Transforming XSLT stylesheets into XQuery expressions and vice versa

XSLT and XQuery are the languages developed by the W3C for transforming and querying XML data. XSLT and XQuery have the same expressive power and can be indeed translated into each other. Many tools either support XSLT or XQuery. In this paper, we show how to translate XSLT stylesheets into equivalent XQuery expressions and vice versa, so that we can apply the same tools to both languages. We also present a performance analysis that compares the execution times of the translation of the original query and of its translated expression using various current XSLT processors and XQuery evaluators.

Result Merging Technique for Answering XPath Query over XSLT Transformed Data

Caching stores the results of previously answered queries in order to answer succeeding queries faster by reusing these results. We propose two different approaches for using caches of XSLT transformed XML data in order to answer queries. The first approach checks whether or not a current query Q can be directly answered from the result of a previously answered query Qi stored in the cache. The new query is otherwise submitted to the source over the network, the answer of the query is determined, transmitted back to the client, and stored in the cache. The second approach determines only the intersection Q-Qi and integrates the result of Q--Qi into the previous results in the cache, which requires applying a numbering scheme for the output of the XSLT stylesheet. We show by experimental results that the second approach can significantly speed up the answering time in comparison to the first approach, but is not significantly slower in few worst cases than the second approach.

Output schemas of XSLT stylesheets and their applications

The capabilities of XSLT processing are widely used to transform XML documents into target XML documents. These target XML documents conform to output schemas of the used XSLT stylesheet. Output schemas of XSLT stylesheets can be used for a static analysis of the used XSLT stylesheet, to automatically detect the XSLT stylesheet of target XML documents or to reason on the output schema without access to the target XML documents. In this paper, we develop an approach to automatically determining the output schema of an XSLT stylesheet. We also describe several application scenarios of output schemas. The experimental evaluation shows that our prototype can determine the output schemas of nearly all typical XSLT stylesheets and the improvements in preciseness in several application scenarios when using output schemas in comparison to when not using output schemas.

Optimizing the execution of XSLT stylesheets for querying transformed XML data

We have to deal with different data formats whenever data formats evolve or data must be integrated from heterogeneous systems. These data when implemented in XML for data exchange cannot be shared freely among applications without data transformation. A common approach to solve this problem is to convert the entire XML data from their source format to the applications’ target formats using the transformations rules specified in XSLT stylesheets. However, in many cases, not all XML data are required to be transformed except for a smaller part described by a user’s query (application). In this paper, we present an approach that optimizes the execution time of an XSLT stylesheet for answering a given XPath query by modifying the XSLT stylesheet in such a way that it would (a) capture only the parts in the XML data that are relevant to the query and (b) process only those XSLT instructions that are relevant to the query. We prove the correctness of our optimization approach, analyze its complexity and present experimental results. The experimental results show that our approach performs the best in terms of execution time, especially when many cost-intensive XSLT instructions can be excluded in the XSLT stylesheet.

Dual syntax for XML languages

XML is successful as a machine processable data interchange format, but it is often too verbose for human use. For this reason, many XML languages permit an alternative more legible non-XML syntax. XSLT stylesheets are often used to convert from the XML syntax to the alternative syntax; however, such transformations are not reversible since no general tool exists to automatically parse the alternative syntax back into XML. We present XSugar, which makes it possible to manage dual syntax for XML languages. An XSugar specification is built around a context-free grammar that unifies the two syntaxes of a language. Given such a specification, the XSugar tool can translate from alternative syntax to XML and vice versa. Moreover, the tool statically checks that the transformations are reversible and that all XML documents generated from the alternative syntax are valid according to a given XML schema.

Syndicating Rich Bibliographic Metadata Using MODS and RSS

Many libraries use RSS to syndicate information about their collections to users. A survey of 65 academic libraries revealed their most common use for RSS is to disseminate information about library holdings, such as lists of new acquisitions. Even though typical RSS feeds are ill suited to the task of carrying rich bibliographic metadata, great potential exists for developing applications that can exploit metadata exposed to Web services via RSS. Using the MODS metadata format, entire catalog records can be seamlessly embedded in RSS 2.0 feeds. Existing tools, such as Library of Congress Java toolkits and XSLT stylesheets, can facilitate this process, while a new XSLT stylesheet may be used to create the RSS feeds complete with MODS records. As an example of the added functionality these MODS/RSS feeds can offer, records from a MODS-enriched RSS feed can be ingested into a non-RSS application such as Zotero. As more emerging library technologies use Web services architectures to handle data objects, the ability to syndicate catalog records will become more critical to providing innovative library Web services.

An XML-based Approach to Handling Tables in Documents

We explore application of XML technology for handling tables in legacy semistructured documents. Specifically, we analyze annotating heterogeneous documents containing tables to obtain a formalized XML Master document that improves traceability (hence easing verification and update) and enables manipulation using XSLT stylesheets. This approach is useful when table instances far outnumber distinct table types because the effort required to annotate a table instance is relatively less compared to formalizing table processing that respects table’s semantics. This work is also relevant for authoring new documents with tables that should be accessible to both humans and machines.

An Adaptive and Voice-Enabled Pervasive Web System

Other than providing Web services through popular Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing may offer new ways of accessing Internet applications by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users, and its technology could involve new ways of interfacing with various types of gateways to back-end servers from any device, anytime, and anywhere. In this study, mobile phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a voice-enabled Web system (VWS), through voice user interface technology. Today’s Web sites are intricate but not intelligent, so finding an efficient method to assist user searching is particularly important. One of these efficient methods is to construct an adaptive Web site. This article shows that multimodal user-interface pages can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML. It also describes how VWS was designed to provide an adaptive voice interface using an Apache Web server, a voice server, a Java servlet engine, and a genetic algorithm based voice Web restructuring mechanism.