Looking for a XML project

[lamhang]

Hi there,

I am looking for a challenging/development project for my masters course. Something with XML, like building tools/comms/data interchanges between systems say between computers/databases etc.

If anyone is looking to something along those lines in a company or as a research item, I'd like to hear.

If you think it's something that's been done to death, let me know as well.

regards
Ben

 

[Andy Dingley]

I am looking for a challenging/development project for my masters course.

Content management. Huge field at the moment. How can you describe "a web page" in a sufficiently generic manner that an automatic layout engine can generate either a page or an XSLT stylesheet to generate a page. The input description should say "Menu bar goes on the left, narrow callou box on the right" or similar, and the "engine" should be able to resolve this for situations where a rigid layout won't fit (handheld devices, voice, in-car). Suppose you can't lay out the web page you want - how can this automatically degrade to what you can offer ?

Syndication - RSS et al. LiveJournal has absorbed a huge portion of the personal blogging market because it has a privacy model that few other systems (like usenet) can offer. How could features of this be applied to other syndication scenarios ?

Ontologies - Take a look at Protege (Stanford) and the various projects and opportunities around that.

 

[Ed Beroset]

Hi there,

I am looking for a challenging/development project for my masters course. Something with XML, like building tools/comms/data interchanges between systems say between computers/databases etc.

If anyone is looking to something along those lines in a company or as a research item, I'd like to hear.

If you think it's something that's been done to death, let me know as well.

Here are some ideas:

1. build a tool set of XSL transforms which convert numerical data into various graphical representations using SVG
2. write a tool or tools to allow non-technical people to create XSL transforms of arbitrary XML data into useful HTML
3. create a model of the economics of transporting XML data via various different communications media. The model should include some notion of the tradeoff between the value human-readable tag names versus terse tags which might shorten communications packets.
4. implement an XSLT engine on an 8-bit embedded microprocessor of your choice.
5. write a tool that reads an RSS news feed and supplements it with an artificial-intelligence derived XML-tagged and cross-referenced synopsis of news items. E.g. have it create categories of news items like "space exploration" or "cricket" based on the content of the news items.

Hope that helps.

Ed

 

[Andrew-J2000]

*Hi there,

I am looking for a challenging/development project for my master course. Something with XML, like building tools/comms/data interchange between systems say between computers/databases etc.

If anyone is looking to something along those lines in a company o as a research item, I'd like to hear.

If you think it's something that's been done to death, let me know a well.

regards
Ben *

Firstly what benefits do you wish to acheive using an XML based syste rather than a RDBMS one? First think of a unique idea, we don't want t reinvent the wheel unless we have a unique angle, do we?

d> create a model of the economics of transporting XML data via variou different communications media. The model should include some notio of the tradeoff between the value human-readable tag names versu terse tags which might shorten communications packets.

Ed, I'm not quite sure what you mean by the above? Care to elaborate

Andrew-J200

 

[lamhang]

Hi again,
I like to say thank you for your responses to my original post. Lots of good ideas there too. I am thinking of working with mobile/pda's to grab data from the server with as little data exchange as possible (discussed in #3 of Ed' post). Wrt dbs and xmldbs, i was thinking of downloading relevant parts of a database (views) as xml(db)s and be able to modify and resend the information back to the server.

A tool for building numerical data into various graphical representation using svg is interesting too. Content management is another interesting kettle of fish too.

thanks again,
Ben

 

[Mikhail Grouchinsky]

Write good xml-diff - diff between 2 xml documents which produces diff as xml too. Diff must be short and allow options for creating context sensitive diff which can be used by something like xml-patch. So far there is no good tool available.

--MG

XMLStarlet Command Line XML/XSLT Toolkit
Open Source Freeware Tool
Visit: http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/

 

[Ed Beroset]

Ed, I'm not quite sure what you mean by the above? Care to elaborate?

Sure. The question that occasionally comes up here is about how to reduce the size of XML so that the transportation of the data over a network is quicker or cheaper. This is a legitimate engineering concern, and one obvious way (among many) to do it is to reduce the tag lengths. For example:

<BookCitation>
<AuthorName>
<Surname>Smith</Surname>
<FirstName>John</FirstName>
</AuthorName>
<BookTitle>Using XML</BookTitle>
</BookCitation>

I expect that it's probably quite clear from the tag names what this is all about, and that clarity is worth something. However, the XML could be compressed into something like this:

<c><a><s>Smith</s><f>John</f></a><t>Using XML</t></c>

The overhead due to XML tag lengths has been reduced, and this would certainly reduce the length of the transmission over, say, a wireless network, but we have all but destroyed the meaning of the tags.

The question, then, is "Under what circumstances and conditions is it worthwhile to perform this type of tag compression?"

Ed

 

[Ed Beroset]

Write good xml-diff - diff between 2 xml documents which produces diff as xml too. Diff must be short and allow options for creating context sensitive diff which can be used by something like xml-patch. So far there is no good tool available.

Adrian Mouat, the author of diffxml did his dissertation on exactly this topic. I haven't tried the tool, but it can be found at http://diffxml.sourceforge.net/

Have you tried it? If so, what inadequacies did you find? Perhaps it can be fixed.

Ed