XSDs from www.heml.org

I thought I should bring to this group's attention the most recent
schema(s) I have developed at the  Historical Event Markup and Linking
project (www.heml.org).

Namespace: 
http://www.heml.org/schemas/2001-07-02/heml

Available at:
http://heml.mta.ca/heml-cocoon/schemas/2001-07-02/heml.xsd

The point of Heml is to define XML elements that outline historical
events asserted in documents across the web and to parse and display
these elements in interesting and useful ways. Imagine a reasonably
light language that can associate the concepts 'William the
Conqueror', '1066 AD in the Gregorian Calendar' and 'Hastings' with,
among other things, an image  of the Bayeux  tapestry; now dream about
information such as this provided on the web in many different
languages and  calendrical systems, and you have the idea.

Alongside its schemas, the Heml project also provides transformations
of its event elements into things like SVG maps and timelines, and
various HTML lists. All this  is wrapped in a Cocoon2-based webapp
freely downloadable under a pot-pourri of open source licences.

Of particular interest to this group may be the automatically
generated documentation for my schema (follow links from www.heml.org
to 'DTDs and Schemas'). The XSLT that does this is a
bit of a  quick hack that grew out of a simpler transformation that
just listed declared groups, elements and types. Still, I can't help
thinking  that a generalized schema documentation XSLT application
would make, e.g.,  a plum MA thesis.

A student of mine wrote a variant of the base schema for use as part
of an XHTML family language, one that simple allows our event elements 
to appear within <p> tags. (Am I right in thinking that W3 hasn't
released a modular schema for XHTML, except, oddly, peppered through the
XHTML Modularization document? I ended up finding an XHTML schema
provided with xsdvalid, the validator provided by the www.xmlmind.com
folks; not sure of its license.) We plan to roll its features into
the stand-alone schema in the next version and to add support for
more difficult chronological concepts and for historical periods.

On the hush-hush (until I make sure the XHTML schema is ok to use), 
you can pick up the XHTML variant at:
http://heml.mta.ca/heml-cocoon/schemas/2002-01-09/xhtml+heml-0.3.xsd

In conclusion, for those seeking working examples of xsd, here's another to
look over; as for the gurus, I'd greatly appreciate any
criticisms  or suggestions the members of this list can offer to this
work.

Yrs,
-- 
Bruce Robertson, Dept. of Classics, Mount Allison University
http://www.mta.ca/faculty/humanities/classics/Robertson/

Received on Saturday, 6 April 2002 09:57:01 UTC