Stührenberg, Maik, Oliver Schonefeld and Andreas Witt. “A standards-related web-based information system.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 - 10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol8.Stuhrenberg01.
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012 August 7 - 10, 2012
Balisage Paper: A standards-related web-based information system
Maik Stührenberg received his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics and Text Technology
from Bielefeld University in 2012. After graduating in 2001 he worked four years as
research assistant at Giessen University in different text-technological projects
together
with Henning Lobin and Georg Rehm. Afterwards, he worked together with Andreas Witt,
Dieter Metzing, Daniela Goecke and Daniel Jettka in the Sekimo project of the Research
Group 437 Text-technological Modelling of Information funded by the German Research
Foundation. During 2011 and 2012 he was employed at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache
(IDS, Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim as member of the CLARIN-D project
group and is currently employed as research assistant at Bielefeld University.
His main research interests include specifications for structuring multiple annotated
data, query languages, and query processing.
Oliver Schonefeld works at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for the German
Language) in Mannheim and is involved in the projects CLARIN and TextGrid. He studied
computer science with specialization in text technology at Bielefeld University until
2005. After graduating he worked as a researcher at Bielefeld University and later
at
Tübingen University's collaborative research center Linguistic Data Structures. His
major
research interests are the limitations of markup languages (especially overlapping
markup)
and the use of markup languages in linguistic description of language data.
Witt received his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics and Text Technology from the
Bielefeld University in 2002 (dissertation title: “Multiple Informationsstrukturierung
mit
Auszeichnungssprachen. XML-basierte Methoden und deren Nutzen für die Sprachtechnologie”).
After graduating in 1996, he started as a researcher and instructor in Computational
Linguistics and Text Technology. He was heavily involved in the establishment of the
minor
subject Text Technology in Bielefeld University's Magister and B.A. program in 1999
and
2002 respectively. After his Ph.D. in 2002 he became an assistant lecturer, still
at the
Text Technology group in Bielefeld. In 2006 he moved to Tübingen University, where
he was
involved in a project on “Sustainability of Linguistic Resources” and in projects
on the
interoperability of language data. Since 2009 he is senior researcher at Institut
für
Deutsche Sprache (Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim. Witt is and was
a member
of several research organizations, amongst them the TEI Special Interest Group on
overlapping markup, for which he was involved in the writing of the latest version
of the
chapter “Multiple Hierarchies”, which is included in TEI-Guidelines P5.
This late breaking proposal is based on an ongoing effort started in the CLARIN project
and which was presented briefly at the LREC 2012 Workshop on Collaborative Resource
Development and Delivery. Initial point was the development of an easy to use information
system for the description of standards developed in ISO/IEC TC37/SC4 Language
Resources Management. Since these standards are heavily related to each other it
is usually not feasible to adopt only a single standard for one's work but to dive
into the
standards jungle in full. Because of positive feedback after the presentation of the
prototype
at the Istanbul Workshop we decided to broaden the information accessible by the system
to
markup language related standards.
The problem with standards
Every year at Balisage's markup game or quiz difficult questions regarding markup
have to
be answered. Even the participants of this very special conference have sometimes
problems to
find the correct answer. An some of the younger generation have never heard terms
like
'sosofo' or 'DSSSL' before. At current, an unmanageable number of standards is available
for
annotating data of various kinds. These standards can be divided into several groups,
according to such different features such as standard body (W3C, ISO, OASIS, HL7,
to name just
a few), basic or derivative work (i. e., standards that are built upon basic specifications),
the state (de jure vs. de facto standard), or the topic. Figure 1 gives a very
rough overview about some of the named aspects. Other divisions would deal with a
temporal
aspect of standardization: specifications change over the time of development, some
(almost)
historical standards have been abandoned and have been replaced by other
specifications.
Figure 1: A rough overview about the complexity in the fields of standardization.
Missing in the aforementioned list is another interesting aspect: the relationships
between different standards. For example, meta languages such as SGML or XML are used
to
define (that is, syntax and possibly a schema formalism) markup languages. A given
markup
language is defined by a schema which in turn is defined by using a schema language
(either a
grammar-based or rule-based constraint language), and so on. Apart from these relations
between basic standards and those that are built upon these, are other relations between
members of the first group and of the second group. Some of the formal restrictions
of XML
instances and XML DTDs (and even XSD) are based on faits accomplis created during
the
development of SGML, DSSSL and HyTime – standards that are decades old. Features
that were already present in DSSSL, have been improved and adapted for current W3C
standards
such as XPath, XSLT and XSL-FO. XPath is usually used via a host language such as
XSLT. The
Corpus Encoding Standard (CES) is an application of the SGML-based version of the
TEI, P3. The
are dozens of similar relations, some are only good for get bonus points at Balisage
Bingo but
others really help in understanding specific issues one may have when working with
a given
specification. At least the knowledge about these older standards and the decisions
that were
made during their design process and which still impact current technologies such
as XML
schema or XSLT runs the risk of being forgotten just because of the amount of time
already
passed.
This holds especially when dealing with non-basic standards, for example with markup
languages for annotating linguistic data. During the last couple of years a large
number of
specifications have been developed in ISO/IEC TC 37/SC 4 Language Resources Management.
These
standards are often released to the public during their various stages of the standardization
process (either as publicly available specialisations, such as Draft International
Standard or
as topic of a research paper). However, these version may substantially differ from
the final
version of the standard which is usually not available without charge. In addition,
the
relations between these specifications are numerous which complicates their correct
use.
Another problem is the fact, that often scholars and researchers are not even aware
that
standardized formats and models exist.
Providing guidance
We propose a community project to build up a platform providing guidance through the
jungle that has been grown around the XML world. Starting with a very small set of
standards
and specifications and constructed as an XRX (XForms, Rest, XQuery) application we
offer the
starting point for a platform that allows Balisage's experts to share their knowledge
with
others. During the last months we have developed a prototypical web-based information
system
that serves as a starting point in providing guidance through the standards jungle
as part of
the CLARIN distributed project group.[1] Up to now, it contains a collection of topics such as Meta
Language, Metadata, Generic Corpus
Annotation, or Constraint Language, amongst others, standard
bodies such as ISO, W3C, OASIS,
and HL7, and 25 specifications at the time of writing. Figure 2 shows a partial screenshot of the current state. Relations between
specifications (in this case between TEI P3 and SGML and P3 and CES) are described
both in a
textual and graphical way.
Figure 2: A screenshot of the current state of the information system (showing TEI's
entry).
Information structure
The information system itself is based on standards as well. We have developed a
lightweight format for structuring information about specifications, topics, and standard
setting bodies defined by an XSD. Although it seems to be at least questionable to
invent
yet another annotation format especially for this kind of project we tried to stick
as close
to existing annotation formats such as the TEI as possible while streamlining the
format and
therefore keeping it small and simple. Figure 3 shows an excerpt of the
storage format.
Figure 3: An excerpt of the storage format
<spec xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xml:id="SpecXML"
standardSettingBody="W3C" topicRef="TopicMetaLanguage"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://localhost:8080/exist/apps/clarin/xsd/spec.xsd">
<titleStmt>
<title>Extensible Markup Language (XML)</title>
<abbr>XML</abbr>
</titleStmt>
<scope>Meta language for Creating Markup Languages</scope>
<description>
<p>The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a meta language specified by a W3C recommendation,
containing both a syntax for describing and serializing data objects called XML documents (or
XML instances) and a formalism for describing document grammars (DTD)
<!-- [...] -->
</p>
</description>
<version xml:id="SpecXML1">
<versionNumber type="major">1.0</versionNumber>
<date>1998-02-10</date>
<respStmt>
<resp>Editor</resp>
<name type="person">Tim Bray</name>
<name type="person">Jean Paoli</name>
<name type="person">C. M. Sperberg-McQueen</name>
</respStmt>
<address type="URL">http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210</address>
<relation target="SpecSGML" type="isSubclassOf">
<p>XML 1.0 is a subset of SGML.</p>
</relation>
</version>
<version xml:id="SpecXML1-SE">
<versionNumber type="major">1.0</versionNumber>
<versionNumber type="minor">Second Edition</versionNumber>
<date>2000-10-06</date>
<!-- [...] -->
</version>
<version xml:id="SpecXML1.1">
<versionNumber type="major">1.1</versionNumber>
<date>2004-02-04</date>
<description>
<p>XML 1.1 differs from XML 1.0 in terms of naming conventions for elements and attributes
(generic identifier) with respect to current and future version of Unicode. Whereas XML
1.0 provided a rigid definition of names, wherein everything that was not permitted was
forbidden, XML 1.1 names are designed so that everything that is not forbidden (for a
specific reason) is permitted. </p>
</description>
<respStmt>
<resp>Editor</resp>
<name type="person">Tim Bray</name>
<name type="person">Jean Paoli</name>
<name type="person">C. M. Sperberg-McQueen</name>
<name type="person">Eve Maler</name>
<name type="person">François Yergeau</name>
<name type="person">John Cowan</name>
</respStmt>
<address type="URL">http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml11-20040204/</address>
<relation target="SpecXML1" type="isVersionOf">
<p>XML 1.1 is a refined version of XML 1.0.</p>
</relation>
</version>
<version xml:id="SpecXML1.1-SE">
<!-- [...] -->
</version>
</spec>
The information is stored in a native XML database system (we have chosen the Open
Source eXist database as starting point but try to do not use any application-dependant
features). Queries on the data are performed via XQuery scripts and forms will be
implemented by XForms (which in turn will be processed by XSLTForms supported by eXist).
The
goal of the information system is not to replicate information that is already available
(but may not be traceable anymore), but to connect pieces of information and enrich
these
pieces with small amounts of additional data. In the example above (Figure 3) we only refer to the information available at the W3C (and
respective places). Information about standard bodies and topics is stored in a similar
way.
Representation
The output of the information system is based on HTML5's XML syntax. Although the
textual representation is feasible for providing detailed information about a given
standard, our plan is to establish an additional graphical representation format.
This
second representation should provide a better overview of the relations between a
large
number of standards at once. Minor demonstrations have been done with D3 Bostock et al., 2011, an Open Source JavaScript library that directly manipulates
objects in the DOM tree to interactively visualize data[2]. However, since JavaScript and XQuery share some syntax elements (e.g. the curly
brackets) there are some minor traps to avoid. In the current prototype we therefore
only
use the non-interactive SVG graphics that are included in the standard's description
page
(see Figure 2). Since browser support for interactive 2- and 3-dimensional
graphics is getting stronger and stronger, other options such as WebGL-based representations
are possible as well (see Jettka and Stührenberg, 2011 for example).
Current state and future work
The current state of the information system is still quite rough. What we want to
propose is allow Balisage's participants to get involved in the process of collecting
and
sharing information about the standards they work with and have knowledge of. In addition,
Balisage is the place to find experts in SVG (which is used to display relations between
two
or more specialisations), XQuery and XForms. If we manage to bring these people together
to
establish a community that is willing to share its knowledge the final product could
be of
much use to scholars and researchers around the world. As a first starting point we
will
publish the XML schema defining the annotation format to receive comments and add
further
enhancements. After a stable format has been established, interesting parties could
create
specification sheets and upload them into the platform. In addition, we will open
the
platform for reading access for other people to give feedback on a less technical
way. The
current prototype is made available at http://clarin.ids-mannheim.de/standards/index.xq.
References
[Bostock et al., 2011] Michael Bostock, Vadim
Ogievetsky, and Jeffrey Heer. D3: Data-driven documents. IEEE Trans. Visualization
& Comp.
Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2011.
[Jettka and Stührenberg, 2011] Daniel Jettka, and
Maik Stührenberg. Visualization of concurrent markup: From trees to graphs, from 2d
to 3d. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference, volume 7 of Balisage Series on Markup
Technologies, Montreal, 2011. doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol7.Jettka01.
[Stührenberg et al., 2012] Maik Stührenberg,
Antonina Werthmann, and Andreas Witt. Guidance through the standards jungle for linguistic
resources. In Nancy M. Ide, Collin Baker, Christiane Fellbaum, and Rebecca Passonneau,
editors, Proceedings of the LREC 2012 Workshop on Collaborative Resource Development
and
Delivery, pages 9–13, 2012.
[1] The system was presented in May 2012 at the LREC 2012 Workshop on Collaborative
Resource Development and Delivery and is described in more detail in Stührenberg et al., 2012.
Daniel Jettka, and
Maik Stührenberg. Visualization of concurrent markup: From trees to graphs, from 2d
to 3d. In
Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference, volume 7 of Balisage Series on Markup
Technologies, Montreal, 2011. doi:https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol7.Jettka01.
Maik Stührenberg,
Antonina Werthmann, and Andreas Witt. Guidance through the standards jungle for linguistic
resources. In Nancy M. Ide, Collin Baker, Christiane Fellbaum, and Rebecca Passonneau,
editors, Proceedings of the LREC 2012 Workshop on Collaborative Resource Development
and
Delivery, pages 9–13, 2012.
