Wednesday Keynote: Unleashing the power of XML

Unleashing the power of XML

Presenter: Darin McBeath, Chief Architect, Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/)

Reed Elsevier - Reed Business, Harcourt Education, LexisNexis, Elsevier (Science & Medical)

Founded in 1880

1987-1994 LexisNexis markup was very flat and intended mainly to support fielded queries.

1994 Reed Elsevier PLC bought Mead Data Central (including LexisNexis) for $1.5BN

1996 ScienceDirect (Reed Elsevier Science Journals) - High quality SGML markup for STM publishing.

1999 XML Gateway (Engineering Village)

2001 Web Services

2002 Elsevier warehouse migrates to XML

• componentized DTDs
• common element pools
• published DTDs (Article, Book)
• packaging standard

2004 Scopus (ability to search 15000 Journals online)

• J2EE
• All XML

2006 All XML all the time

Biggest Challenges that XML poses for publishers:

• migration of proprietary content
• performance (finely tuned proprietary solutions are faster than generic XML solutions)
  
• retraining
• over/misuse
• industry acceptance of XML standards
• XML knowledge is confined to the technical groups

Main benefits of XML

• portability
• non proprietary
• human readable
• repurposing
• standards
• validation

Main weaknesses of XML

• namespaces
• XML Schema is overly complex
• everyone can do it
• external entity resolution
• evolving standards
• performance

XQuery is an important new technology for publishing

XQuery (and XML Databases)

• No need to shred documents for storage
• Agile development
• No Predefined granularity
• Simplicity (no need for separate database schema)
• Next generation publishing platform
• Content repurposing
• Fabrication
• Mashups
  

XQdocs - XQuery documentation tool

http://xqdoc.org/index.html

The Future

• mind the gap
• mashups (Web 2.0)
• levels of intermediation
• focus on markup
• local distribution of content
• partnerships
  

posted by Unknown @ 9:05 AM