Extensible Markup Language

The Extensible Markup Language is a language designed for the definition of document structures, and the production of structured documents. It can be used to define application-specific representations that are easy to process and transform, facilitating the interchange of information between different systems and components.

Frequency

This subject has been discontinued; no further courses are planned. It has been replaced by Structured Data (STR).

Objectives

At the end of the course, students will understand how data is structured and described in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and be able to

• design an XML document for a variety of applications;
• create Schema documents to validate XML documents;
• query an XML document using XPath;
• write and apply user-defined functions to an XML document;
• transform an XML description into other language representations, such as Text, HTML or alternative XML representations;
• apply the essential XML technologies to common software problems.

Contents

Introduction

motivation for XML, representing data in XML.

XML Schemas

defining the structure and content of a document; a type system for XML.

XSLT

translating XML documents to various multimedia formats; functional programming in XSL.

XPath

locating XML content within an XML document.

XML in context

bibliography databases, domain specific languages.

Requirements

There are no particular requirements for this course.