Academic

Selected Academic, Conference and Forum Material

If you have or find material, please email rjelliffe(at)allette.com.au

Basilage Conferences

Bauman, Syd. “Freedom to Constrain: where does attribute constraint come from, mommy?”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2008, Montréal, Canada, August 12 – 15, 2008. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2008. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 1 (2008). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol1.Bauman01.
(http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol1/html/Bauman01/BalisageVol1-Bauman01.html)

Durand, Jacques, Stephen Green, Serm Kulvatunyou and Tom Rutt. “Test Assertions on steroids for XML artifacts.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009, Montréal, Canada, August 11 – 14, 2009. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 3 (2009). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol3.Durand01.
(http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol3/html/Durand01/BalisageVol3-Durand01.html)

Graham, Tony. “focheck XSL-FO Validation Framework.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2016, Washington, DC, August 2 – 5, 2016. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2016. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 17 (2016). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol17.Graham01.
(http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol17/html/Graham01/BalisageVol17-Graham01.html)

Hamilton, Kate, and Lauren Wood. “Schematron in the Context of the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA).”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 – 10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol8.Wood01.
(http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol8/html/Wood01/BalisageVol8-Wood01.html)

Lubell, Joshua. “Documenting and Implementing Guidelines with Schematron.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009, Montréal, Canada, August 11 – 14, 2009. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 3 (2009). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol3.Lubell01.
(http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol3/html/Lubell01/BalisageVol3-Lubell01.html)

Jakub Malý, Martin Nečaský. “Utilizing new capabilities of XML languages to verify integrity constraints.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012, Montréal, Canada, August 7 – 10, 2012. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 8 (2012).doi:10.4242/BalisageVol8.Maly01.
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol8/print/Maly01/BalisageVol8-Maly01.html)

Nordström, Ari. “Semantic Profiling Using Indirection.”
Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, Montréal, Canada, August 6 – 9, 2013. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 10 (2013). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol10.Nordstrom01.
(http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol10/html/Nordstrom01/BalisageVol10-Nordstrom01.html)

Papers

Sobeslav Benda, Jakub Klımek, Martin Necaský.
“Using Schematron as Schema Language in Conceptual Modeling for XML”,
Proceedings of the Ninth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM 2013), Adelaide, Australia pp 31-40.
Retrieved from http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV143Benda.pdf.

Michal Kozák,
Schematron Schema Inference, Master Thesis,
Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.ksi.mff.cuni.cz/~holubova/dp/Kozak.pdf.

Rick Jelliffe comments:
The paper mentions the general problem with converting grammars of the class that corresponds to RELAX NG to Schematron. However, the two leading grammar-based schema languages are in a less difficult/powerful class, and actually fail to make available to users the very thing that regular grammars might provide over XPath: the ability to identify and treat differently the same element when it appears in different positions (to wit, the XSD Unique Particle Attribution rule.) However, of course, it is not necessarily true that the pattern of constraints being expressed by the RELAX NG schema could not also be described, in a very different way, in ISO Schematron using thought.

Fernando Orejas,Hartmut Ehrig, and Ulrike Prange.
“A Logic of Grammar Constraints”
Conference paper, International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering. FASE 2008. Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, Fiadeiro, José Luiz and Inverardi, Paola (Eds) pp 179-198, Volume 4961 of the book series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer Berlin Heidelberg DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-78743-3_14   Retrieved from http://www.zib.de/golas/papers/OEP08.pdf (PDF)

Web Pages and Presentations

Middel, Martin.  Soft Validation in an Editor Environment.
Conference slides from XML Prague 2017. Retrieved from http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2017/files/presentations/soft-validation/

Imsieke, Gerrit. A Text Structure “Epischema” for TEI”
Conference slides from XML Prague 2017. Retrieved from http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2017/files/presentations/epischema/index.html#/

Bina, George.
Schematron for Information Architects
Conference paper from XML Prague 2015. Retrieved from http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2015/files/xmlprague-2015-proceedings.pdf.

The above paper relates to using Schematron with DITA.

Jelliffe, Rick. Validating Operational Grammars in Schematron, blog post, “O’Reilly Broadcast” Retrieved from http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/07/validating-operator-grammars-i.html

The above presentation is a companion to Schema languages as if annotation matters

Graham, Tony.
“Validating XSL-FO with RELAX NG and Schematron”.
XML London, 2015. Retrieved from http://xmllondon.com/2015/xmllondon-2015-proceedings.pdf#page=143.

Lee, Dongwon. Chu, Wesley. Comparative Analysis of Six XML Schema Languages. 2000. UCLA, USA.
Retrieved from http://www.cobase.cs.ucla.edu/tech-docs/dongwon/ucla-200008.html

Rick Jelliffe comments: since this paper was written based on Schematron 1.4, there have been several improvements to Schematron that meet gaps suggested by the report, including in the areas of modularity, keys, default values (simulated by ISO Schematron 2016 “properties”) and inheritance (ISO Schematron “abstract patterns”).

Nadolu, Octavian. Kutscherauer, Nico.
Schematron QuickFix
XML Prague 2016. Retrieved from http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2016/files/xmlprague-2016-proceedings.pdf

Sales, Andrew.
“Validating office documents in the publishing production workflow”
Conference presentation from XML Prague 2015. Retrieved from http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2016/files/xmlprague-2016-proceedings.pdf

Walsh, Norm; Cohen, John.
Schema Languages Comparison. 2001. Report for Town Hall Meeting at XML 2001 Conference, Orlando, Florida, USA.
Retrieved from http://nwalsh.com/xml2001/schematownhall/slides/index.html.

Rick Jelliffe comments: since this paper, there have been several developments or techniques developed which means that Schematron can be marked as “Yes” for all the items in the scorecard: 28/28. For example, ISO Schematron 2016 properties allow (in effect) attribute defaulting; using XSLT2 provides regular expression assertions on strings. An earlier version of the report mentioned the provision of element checking using regular expressions; this can indeed also be done in Schematron using the technique in my O’Reilly blog Can Schematron use grammars to test assertions? (Contrast with XSD 1.0 which had 15/28 Yes (several with limitations), 3/28 Some and 10 Noes.) XSD 2.0 has improved this somewhat by adopting an mildly unsatisfactory kind of XPath assertion testing.
While it was entirely appropriate and polite for this report to avoid allocating any one schema language as being universaly better than another for every situation, I did feel at the time that the results of the scorecards were so obvious that it would be difficult for an objective person (which I surely cannot be) to avoid suspecting that the grammar-based approach for schema was inherently defective, except for some niche uses such state-machine-driven editors.

Historical Material

Jelliffe, Rick, Family Tree of Schema Languages for Markup Languages, blog, “O’Reilly Community” website, Retrieved from http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/family-tree-of-schema-language.html

Raggett, Dave. Assertion Grammars, 1999, W3C. Retrieved from https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/dtdgen/Docs/.

Chahuneau, François. Beyond the DTD (submission fragment) retrieved from http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/chahuneauXML.html. (See also quote at end of abstract of talk at SGMLXML’97.)

Jelliffe, Rick. On
Validating Webs not just Trees. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20000816002509/http://www.sinica.edu.tw/~ricko/ValidTrees.html.

Jelliffe, Rick Using
XSL as a Structure Validation Language, InterCHANGE Magazine, USA, July 1999. Online version retrieved from
http://web.archive.org/web/20000816002509/http://www.ascc.net/xml/en/utf-8/XSLvalidation.html

Nentwich, Christian and Capra, Licia and Emmerich, Wolfgang and Finkelstein, Anthony.
“xlinkit: a consistency checking and smart link generation service”, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), Volume 2 Issue 2, May 2002, Pages 151-185, ACM New York, NY, USA

Norton, Francis. Generating XSL Validators Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20000816002509/http://www.redrice.com/ci/generatingXslValidators.html

Rick Jelliffe comments: Other notes on alternative approaches to schemas investigated during my time at Academia Sinica Computing Centre can be found at schema page. I would like to note that there is no real material that describes one of the central motivations for Schematron: which is that Schematron was developed in part as a response to the suggestion from Taiwanese academics that formal grammar theory was not intuitively credible to Chinese in the way that it might be to Westerners, in that their concept of language was based on the ideograph rather than discrete words. This raised the question, what would a schema language look like that did not have this potential cultural bias?

See also Robin Cover’s CoverPages collection of links for Schematron from 1999 to 2007. Researchers interested in SGML and XML material may find much of interest on this site, hosted by the OASIS standards consortium.