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ABSTRACT
This article deals with the structuring of XML files, how to produce, use, and to query them through various prisms. After a short historical introduction on the industrial and intellectual causes that led to the rise of XML as a data and information storage format. Then the article introduces to the grammars and vocabularies that allow the structuring and documentary qualification in industry or culture. The article continues by applying the rules of XML in knowledge management and by an incursion into the Web of linked data. Finally, the article presents XML as a structure, a vector for storing and sharing data: it explores the potential of XML as a database, methods for querying, exchanging and flow of data.
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Read the articleAUTHORS
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Gérald Kembellec: Research Fellow at the German Historical Center, Digital Humanities Department - Senior lecturer at CNAM on secondment - Laboratoire Dicen-IdF (EA 7339) / Research theme(s): Data, mediation, enhancement - Paris, France
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Nicolas TRAVERS: Lecturer at the Léonard de Vinci Research Center, Pôle Universitaire - Senior lecturer at CNAM on secondment - DVRC Laboratory / Pôle Universitaire, Paris, France - Associate researcher at the CEDRIC laboratory / CNAM, Paris, France
INTRODUCTION
The emergence of information systems in industry led to the creation of computer languages for storing data in devices and creating information, as well as for describing information and performing computations. Finally, other languages were invented to present data or the information derived from it. In this article, we focus on one language in particular, XML, which has the particularity of being able to meet most of the needs cited – apart from programming. XML and its dialects offer the possibility of storing, describing, filtering, querying and presenting content. What's more, it's a free and open language, requiring no specific software for its use.
We present here a historical overview of XML's emergence, its evolution and, by no means exhaustively, its various usage frameworks. This article is illustrated by a number of technical examples to give a better understanding of the most representative dialects of this language.
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KEYWORDS
XML | XPath | XQuery | RDF
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- ISO Information processing – Office systems – Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) - ISO 8879 1986 ISO - 1986
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JEdit is a cross-platform, GNU GPL-licensed editor written in Java that lets you edit XML files and generate DTDs from an XML model.
See https://www.sourceforge.net/projects/jedit/files/jedit/
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