Sticking Your Nose into Your Own Business: Metering and Measurement as the Focus for XML Workflows

»Rick Jelliffe, »Topologi, Pty. Ltd.

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Abstract

XML lends itself to systems constructed of pipelines and data services. This paper looks at new and recent trends in software engineering, such as unit-testing and pragmatic metrics, and how they can be applied to XML systems, in part through the lens of free and commercial projects the author has been involved in. The current rule-based approaches of XForms and Schematron are discussed, together with new techniques such as stylesheet validation and document-set sampling.

Project scoping, project management and quality assurance aspects are also discussed. The paper emphasizes the need to detect and defuse timebombs early, rather than on waiting until the end of a pipeline or at delivery time. Issues of validating data on high-volume systems are discussed also.

Keywords

»Schematron, »Software Engineering, »Validation, »Xpath.

1. Paper Not Received

The paper was not received in time to go into the proceedings.

Biography

»Rick Jelliffe

C.T.O.

»Topologi, Pty. Ltd.

»Sydney, New South Wales

»Australia

Email: ricko@topologi.com

Web: http://www.topologi.com/

Rick Jelliffe is the C.T.O. of Topologi Pty. Ltd, an Australian companysupplying integration solutions for large scale publishing and markup operations, http://www.topologi.com/ He has been involved in publishing and markup since the late 1980s.As a standards activist, Rick Jelliffe is a recognized expert in schema languages and internationalization, where his ideas haveinfluenced XML and SGML. He is currently the editor of the ISO Schematron schema langage standard and an invited expert to the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. He previously was a member of the W3C XML Schemas Working Group, Australian delegate to ISO JTC1/SC34 Document Description and Processing Languages, the China/Japan/Korea Document Processing Expert Group and the W3C XML Interest Group. He was the project lead on the "Chinese XML Now!" project http://www.ascc.net/xml and the author of "The XML & SGML Cookbook" for Prentice Hall.In his spare time, Rick plays with his dog and avoids computers by posing as a kind of well-intentioned vegetable.