Abstract

Using Excel Professional 2003 save as XML and a series of XSL Stylesheets called the "Constructor" an XML Topic Map is immediately created. What makes this work is that one of the sheets in the Excel workbook, Constructor, is used by the customer (with help I find!) to specify where information needed to generate topics and associations will be found in other sheets. The process assumes that topics or associations are generated for each and every row of any sheets mentioned in the Constructor. It is possible to create associations with multiple members with each member playing a different role. The column of one sheet may be used to enumerate the column heads of another sheet to create a join. This eliminates the need to write any XSL to create a Topic Map thus freeing up time to write the application XSL based on the generated topic map. This has been successfully used in a couple of small in-house projects.