Proceedings

Abstract:

This presentation is based on a deployed enterprise system designed and integrated to support over 250 plus users for a west coast legislature. The system includes legislative authoring, legislative processing (Introducing, Amending, Enrolling, and Chaptering Bills), document publishing, and updating the State laws.

The system is used by legislative lawyers and support staff to draft Bills, Resolutions and related documents. The system also publishes and updates bills through the legislative process. Xcential and the customer designed the system where all documents are stored and processed as XML, from the client authoring (a custom editor built on XMetaL), to the database storage (Oracle XML DB), to the publishing service.

Oracle Consulting has developed an XML Content Access Layer in between, to abstract the repository layer. This layer is designed to bridge the gap from the database to the client tools by providing common access API's, implement "Best Practices" for Oracle XML DB usage, and to provide this functionality in a performance tuned manner for each implementation.

The case study covers, from front to back:

1) Overview of the legislative process

2) XML challenges presented by this application

* Reuse of content across documents - a bill contains fragments of code Amendment content is put into bills. Bills update codes. Digests summarize bills.

* Free-form authoring of structured documents

* Publishing fidelity to established publishing standards

* Representing decades of legacy data while laying a technical foundation for the future

* Support across Database, Editors

2)Solutions

* Multiple schemas - each for appropriate its role

* XHTML

* Legislative Schema

* XLink

* Same schemas for all documents - enables reuse of data and code

* Separating metadata from document content

* Abstraction Layers

* SOAP and WebDAV

* Repository Interface

* EJB and JMS

* Appropriate technologies

* XMetaL

* Oracle XML DB

* RenderX XEP

3) Lessons Learned

* Pointers on building an XML application and designing your XML Schema

* The use of an abstraction layer, with tips on designing and building one

* Best practices for Oracle XML DB

* Making it all work together : problems and their solutions