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DTD Reengineering: A Case Study

Abstract

It's a rare DTD that never gets revised. But what happens after numerous revision cycles performed by different authors? Sometimes, the answer is confusion.

This presentation will describe the process which was used to reengineer a DTD for publishing textbooks. It will cover:

- The methods which were used to analyze the existing DTD code

- The tools and report formats which were used to support analysis

- The principles which were used to drive design and modularization decisions

- The documentation conventions which were used to manage and document the revision process

- The starting point for a DTD prettyprinter

- The coding standards which were used to anticipate future changes

Keywords


1. Paper Not Received

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

Biography

Mr. Conrad is an independent consultant, specializing in the seamy underbelly of dysfunctionality that emerges where business processes and technology collide.He has more than 16 years of experience in both strategic and operational consulting, providing services in such areas as: Strategic Planning and Mediation, Organizational Development, Knowledge Management and Engineering, Information Architecture, Document Analysis, DTD Design, and Project Management.He started working with generalized markup in 1992 and is recognized for his work dealing with the organizational and policy implications of markup languages. This work has pulled him into two complementary directions, both dealing with the migration toward highly-granular, semantically-rich documentation and other knowledge artifacts.The first deals with the mechanics of modularizing and structuring documents and applying meaningful semantics. This has driven developments in the areas of semantic modeling, knowledge representation, metadata management, and ontology development.The second deals with the difficulty that organizations have both making investment decisions and reaching consensus on the value of and meanings embedded within their information and knowledge holdings. This has driven the development of a variety of strategic planning and social decision-making methodologies.As a certified instructor, he has taught basic and advanced technology concepts to individuals of all backgrounds. Most recently, his training activities have been focused on XML and related standards.