A distributed editing environment for XML documents

2007

In many areas the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) is becoming the standard exchange and data format. More and more applications not only support XML as an exchange format but also use it as their data model or default file format for graphic, text and database (such as spreadsheet) applications. Computer Supported Cooperative Work is an interdisciplinary field of research dealing with group work, cooperation and their supporting information and communication technologies. One part of it is Real-Time Collaborative Editing, which investigates the design of systems which allow several persons to work simultaneously in real-time on the same document, without the risk of inconsistencies. Existing collaborative editing research applications specialize in one or at best, only a small number of document types; for example graphic, text or spreadsheet documents. This research investigates the development of a software framework which allows collaborative editing of any XML document type in...

2003

XML and its associated technologies are increasingly being used in Electronic Publishing. This fact is due to some of its inherent characteristics: (1) XML allows separating the contents and the presentation format. (2) XML allows giving a logical structure to information. (3) XML allows associating semantics to the logical structure. There is a general agreement that these features will be very important for the development of the semantic web. In this context there is a demand for XML editors. A comparative analysis of current XML editors reveals that most of them have two general lacks. Firstly, using these editors requires deep knowledge of the XML syntax and its DTD or the XML-Schema particular vocabulary. Their interfaces do not guide to user in the edition process, e.g. by showing him/her the different possibilities available at any moment with respect to vocabulary. This drawback is especially discouraging for naïve users. Secondly, the validation of a document is made on request to specific commands or on saving it. In the worst case, these tools allow generating an invalid document that accumulates errors and overwhelms the user during their correction. In this paper, we describe an editor of XML documents, called eXitor, that shares the common features of the main XML editors, but tries to solve the two problems quoted above. With respect to the visibility of XML syntax, the editor supports both naïve and expert users. For the first kind of users, the user can understand the document structure without the need to see the XML source code. For the expert users, the tool allows displaying XML syntax. With respect to the validation problem, the user interface does not allow generating non-valid XML documents. During the edition process, elements and attributes can be inserted guaranteeing that the XML document is well-formed and valid with respect to a given DTD. (In the specific case of XML Schema this tool only supports DocBook XML Schema V4.1.2.3.) In summary, its main characteristics are: (1) The tool can hide syntactic information (XML syntax and DTD or Schema syntax), only displaying the textual contents of the elements. (2) The tool can display syntax information to the advanced user. (3) The document structure is always shown in a tree format. (4) The tool forces to introduce all the compulsory components. (5) At any moment, the document is well formed and valid.

2002

2000

XML is an SGML-based language designed for the interchange of documents with more flexible and powerful features than those provided by HTML. It can be considered as an intermediate step between HTML and SGML. On one hand, it is a fully conformant SGML application, but without most of the features of SGML that make it complex to handle or that are rarely used. On the other hand, XML is not restricted to a fixed DTD as HTML is: users can choose from the set of available DTDs the one that is best suited for their applications, or develop new ones for fully satisfying their requirements.

Issues In Information Systems, 2006

XML message brokering systems support customization that modifies the structure and content of XML messages under dissemination. This allows customized content delivery and data and application integration. In this work we present an approach for modifying XML documents in the context of XML message brokering. In our approach we propose to store XML data in its native form in a BDB XML database and perform updates specified in XQuery language. We compare our approach with another technique that stores XML data in relational tables.

2007

Emerging non-standard applications like the production of high-quality spatial sound pose new challenges to data management. Beside the need for a flexible transactional management of complex hierarchical scene descriptions a main requirement is the support of cooperative processes allowing a group of authors to edit a scene together in a distributed environment. Based on previous work on cooperative and non-standard transactions we present in this paper a transaction model and protocol for XML databases addressing this issues.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010

Commutative Replicated Data-Type (CRDT) is a new class of algorithms that ensure scalable consistency of replicated data. It has been successfully applied to collaborative editing of texts without complex concurrency control.

2004

2001

This paper presents an overview of the Xylia software library, this library is being designed for the development of user friendly visual editors for the eXtensible Markup Language (XML)[1]. XML is a standard for markup languages. Each language conforming to XML is similar in structure to HTML, but has its own set of permissible tags, and rules about how they may relate. XML is designed to store structured data in a standardized, cross-platform, textual format. The Java programming language and the Swing toolkit from Sun Microsystems [2] are being used to build the library, which is suitable for application developers who wish to create simple, easy to use, robust editors for specific XML languages. Since both technologies are intended to promote cross-platform and cross-application interoperability, they are a good match for each other.

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2001

XML is emerging as an important format for describing the schema of documents and data to facilitate integration of applications in a variety of industry domains. An important issue that naturally arises is the requirement to generate, store and access XML documents. It is important to reuse existing data management systems and repositories for this purpose. In this paper, we describe the XML Access Server (XAS), a general purpose XML based storage and retrieval system which p r o vides the appearance of a large set of XML documents while retaining the data in underlying federated data sources that could be relational, object-oriented, or semi-structured. XAS automatically maps the underlying data into virtual XML components when mappings between DTDs and underlying schemas are established. The components can be presented as XML documents or assembled into larger components. XAS manages the relationship between XML components and the mapping in the form of Document Composition Logic. The versatility in its ways to generate XML documents enables XAS to serve a large number of XML components and documents e ciently and expediently.