Australian W3C Office
Australian W3C OfficeDSTC and the Australian W3C Office presented an intensive one day technical workshop on W3C's XML activities on 14 January 2005 in Brisbane. The presentations from the workshop are now available.
| HTML | XML: Living on the edge Liam Quin (W3C) |
| PDF (198KB) | XML Schema: An architectural tour Henry Thompson (University of Edinburgh / W3C) |
| XSLT 2.0/XPath 2.0: your prayers answered Michael Sperberg-McQueen (W3C) | |
| PDF (683KB) | Querying XML - XQuery, SQL/XML, and SQL in context Stephen Buxton (Oracle) |
| PDF (3.5MB) | XQuery in Relational Databasems Michael Rys (Microsoft) |
| PDF (364KB) | XQuery at your Web Service! Jerome Simeon (IBM) |
The success of XML is evident everywhere today. However, there are many parts of XML and its related technologies that deserve more attention. This talk will make you aware of how many of it's features came about, and where the future of XML is heading. It will highlight features that the competent developer should be aware of (e.g. namespaces and whitespace behaviour), so that they can avoid design problems and be able to exploit the true power of XML.
Liam is currently the XML Activity Lead at the W3C, and staff contact for the XML Query and Binary Characterization Working Groups.
Liam joined the W3C in 2000; he's been working with text-based markup and digital typography since nroff days (1981) and with SGML since 1987. He worked at SoftQuad Inc in Toronto, where he was involved in the development of SoftQuad's HoTMetaL, the first commercial HTML editor for the Web, and also with SoftQuad Panorama, a browser plugin to display SGML; this in turn demonstrated a need to standardise the use of SGML on the Web, and Liam was involved in the development of the XML specification.
Liam has been involved in free software since 1983, including lq-text, a text retrieval package for Unix, the GNOME project, Mandrake Linux, and many other open source and free projects.
This talk will describe the design philosophy and features of XML Schema. XML Schema is a rich and powerful mechanism for providing structures for XML. Henry has been intimately involved with the design and development of XML Schema, and he will take us on an tour of its features - pointing out beautiful and famous landmarks and places where great men have died in heroic battles.
Henry Thompson undertakes research half-time in the Language Technology Group in the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is also associated with the School of Artificial Intelligence and the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems. Henry is interested in Computational Linguistics, Data-Intensive Linguistics, Language Corpora and Corpus Management and Markup Architectures. His current research efforts are directed towards developing XML standards and XML-related tools. Henry was involved in the W3C SGML Working Group, whose work led to the XML recommendation: Extensible Markup Language (XML), and he is currently a member of the XSL and XML Schema working groups.
XSLT and XPath have been extremely powerful for processing XML documents. However, people wanted more. The new revisions of XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 offer more power and features. This talk will cover what's available and how you can use them.
Michael Sperberg-McQueen is a member of the W3C Architecture Domain (served as its domain leader from July 2001 to September 2003). Michael is Co-chair of the XML Coordination Group and of the XML Schema Working Group. He is also Co-coordinator of the Model Editions Partnership, a research project funded by the (U.S.) National Historical Publications and Records Commission to build prototypes of historical documentary editions in electronic form, using TEI markup. Michael was also Co-editor of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 spec (1998) and the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (1994). Michael served as Editor in chief of the Text Encoding Initiative, an international cooperative project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchance of electronic text for research (1988-2000). Michael has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University (1985)
XQuery is gathering momentum as a powerful, flexible, general-purpose query language for searching within and across XML documents and fragments. But on its own, it's just a query language - it defines a transformation from one XQuery Data Model instance to another.
On the other hand, relational databases and SQL have been storing, managing and searching the world's most valuable data for decades. But SQL (before XML extensions) could not leverage the information implicit in the structure of XML.
Many see XQuery and SQL as competitive technologies: this paper describes how XQuery and SQL can be complementary in practical applications, each leveraging the strengths of the other. SQL can extend its query capabilities via XML extensions - SQL/XML and XQuery functions - while XQuery can query SQL databases and repositories. XQuery and SQL together can meet any application's query requirements.
The presentation includes an overview of XML and query technologies, and some practical advice on choosing the right mix of technologies for your application.
Stephen Buxton is Director of Product Management in Oracle's Server Technologies division. He works closely with developers and customers on Oracle's XML and Text Retrieval products, including Oracle's XQuery implementation. Stephen is a member of the XML Query Working Group, and is an editor on several of the XQuery Full-Text drafts.
Relational database systems (and the related standards body ANSI/INCITS H2) are busy adding XML support. One of the main components of such XML extensions will be support for the upcoming XML query language XQuery.
The presentation will outline how XQuery and XML conceptually fit into a relational database environment. It will cover the organization of the XML in the database, how to type it using W3C XML Schema, how to query it both in conjunction with SQL and using top-level XQuery. It will present the concepts, talk about new developments in the ISO/ANSI SQL/XML standards and present some demos of XQuery in the upcoming Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
Michael Rys is program manager for SQL Server's XML Technologies. He also represents Microsoft Corp. in the W3C XML Query working group and the ANSI SQL standardization effort. He joined Microsoft in 1998 after performing research in the areas of object-oriented and semi-structured databases, multi-level transaction management, and distributed heterogeneous information integration at Stanford University (as post-doc) and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where he earned his PhD.
Michael is a member of ACM and IEEE and has given many presentations and contributed to several books on XQuery and XML and databases.
XQuery has been designed and is known for its use as an XML query language, which is, it can be used to express concisely complex request on top of large XML repositories. But at the same time, XQuery is also a small functional language which can easily be extended to support more complex application development.
In this talk, I will present a first step toward making XQuery an integral part of the Web services development infrastructure. Notably I will present simple extensions to XQuery which enables to deploy Web services from an XQuery module, to import Web services within XQuery as modules. I will show how to use those extensions to perform simple Web services composition. Those extensions have been implemented as part of the Galax XQuery 1.0 processor.
Jerome Simeon works at IBM, and is an invited expert to the XML Query Working Group. He is an editor of XQuery 1.0, of XPath 2.0 and of the XQuery 1.0 Formal Semantics. Jerome is also interested in XML storage, Semantic Web and data integration. He graduated in Ecole Polytechnique and Supelec, and obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Universite d'Orsay. Between 1995 and 1999, he was a member of the Verso Database Group at INRIA.
The Australian W3C Office is hosted by CSIRO
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