Looking for a XML project

[lamhang]

Hi there,

I am looking for a challenging/development project for my masters course.
Something with XML, like building tools/comms/data interchanges between
systems say between computers/databases etc.

If anyone is looking to something along those lines in a company or as a
research item, I'd like to hear.

If you think it's something that's been done to death, let me know as well.

regards
Ben

 

[Andy Dingley]

I am looking for a challenging/development project for my masters course.

Content management. Huge field at the moment. How can you describe "a
web page" in a sufficiently generic manner that an automatic layout
engine can generate either a page or an XSLT stylesheet to generate a
page. The input description should say "Menu bar goes on the left,
narrow callou box on the right" or similar, and the "engine" should be
able to resolve this for situations where a rigid layout won't fit
(handheld devices, voice, in-car). Suppose you can't lay out the web
page you want - how can this automatically degrade to what you can
offer ?

Syndication - RSS et al. LiveJournal has absorbed a huge portion of
the personal blogging market because it has a privacy model that few
other systems (like usenet) can offer. How could features of this be
applied to other syndication scenarios ?

Ontologies - Take a look at Protege (Stanford) and the various
projects and opportunities around that.

 

[Ed Beroset]

Hi there,

I am looking for a challenging/development project for my masters course.
Something with XML, like building tools/comms/data interchanges between
systems say between computers/databases etc.

If anyone is looking to something along those lines in a company or as a
research item, I'd like to hear.

If you think it's something that's been done to death, let me know as well.

Here are some ideas:

1. build a tool set of XSL transforms which convert numerical data into
various graphical representations using SVG
2. write a tool or tools to allow non-technical people to create XSL
transforms of arbitrary XML data into useful HTML
3. create a model of the economics of transporting XML data via various
different communications media. The model should include some notion of
the tradeoff between the value human-readable tag names versus terse
tags which might shorten communications packets.
4. implement an XSLT engine on an 8-bit embedded microprocessor of your
choice.
5. write a tool that reads an RSS news feed and supplements it with an
artificial-intelligence derived XML-tagged and cross-referenced synopsis
of news items. E.g. have it create categories of news items like "space
exploration" or "cricket" based on the content of the news items.


Hope that helps.

Ed

 

[Andrew-J2000]

*Hi there,

I am looking for a challenging/development project for my master
course.
Something with XML, like building tools/comms/data interchange
between
systems say between computers/databases etc.

If anyone is looking to something along those lines in a company o
as a
research item, I'd like to hear.

If you think it's something that's been done to death, let me know a
well.

regards
Ben *

Firstly what benefits do you wish to acheive using an XML based syste
rather than a RDBMS one? First think of a unique idea, we don't want t
reinvent the wheel unless we have a unique angle, do we?

d> create a model of the economics of transporting XML data via variou
different communications media. The model should include some notio
of the tradeoff between the value human-readable tag names versu
terse tags which might shorten communications packets.

Ed, I'm not quite sure what you mean by the above? Care to elaborate

Andrew-J200

 

[lamhang]

Hi again,
I like to say thank you for your responses to my original post. Lots of good
ideas there too.
I am thinking of working with mobile/pda's to grab data from the server with
as little data exchange as possible (discussed in #3 of Ed' post). Wrt dbs
and xmldbs, i was thinking of downloading relevant parts of a database
(views) as xml(db)s and be able to modify and resend the information back to
the server.

A tool for building numerical data into various graphical representation
using svg is interesting too.
Content management is another interesting kettle of fish too.

thanks again,
Ben

 

[Mikhail Grouchinsky]

Write good xml-diff - diff between 2 xml documents which produces diff as
xml too. Diff must be short and allow options for creating context
sensitive diff which can be used by something like xml-patch.
So far there is no good tool available.


--MG

************************************************

XMLStarlet Command Line XML/XSLT Toolkit
Open Source Freeware Tool
Visit: http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/

************************************************

 

[Ed Beroset]

Ed, I'm not quite sure what you mean by the above? Care to elaborate?

Sure. The question that occasionally comes up here is about how to
reduce the size of XML so that the transportation of the data over a
network is quicker or cheaper. This is a legitimate engineering
concern, and one obvious way (among many) to do it is to reduce the tag
lengths. For example:

<BookCitation>
<AuthorName>
<Surname>Smith</Surname>
<FirstName>John</FirstName>
</AuthorName>
<BookTitle>Using XML</BookTitle>
</BookCitation>

I expect that it's probably quite clear from the tag names what this is
all about, and that clarity is worth something. However, the XML could
be compressed into something like this:

<c><a><s>Smith</s><f>John</f></a><t>Using XML</t></c>

The overhead due to XML tag lengths has been reduced, and this would
certainly reduce the length of the transmission over, say, a wireless
network, but we have all but destroyed the meaning of the tags.

The question, then, is "Under what circumstances and conditions is it
worthwhile to perform this type of tag compression?"

Ed

 

[Ed Beroset]

Write good xml-diff - diff between 2 xml documents which produces diff as
xml too. Diff must be short and allow options for creating context
sensitive diff which can be used by something like xml-patch.
So far there is no good tool available.

Adrian Mouat, the author of diffxml did his dissertation on exactly this
topic. I haven't tried the tool, but it can be found at
http://diffxml.sourceforge.net/

Have you tried it? If so, what inadequacies did you find? Perhaps it
can be fixed.

Ed