Abstract: "A great deal of the collective knowledge of organizations is stored in documents. To be able to use documents effectively, the information structure in the documents should be carefully planned. International standards, for example SGML, have been developed for defining document structures. The definition method however is not enough. For defining effective document standards for an organization, a profound document analysis is needed. In the analysis, current documents and document management practices should be studied and described before developing new document structures and document management practices. The development of a methodology for document analysis is going on in a project studying legislative documents produced in the Finnish government and parliament. The article describes the first results of the project. As the document structure definition method, SGML is used in the project. The analysis method is developed and extended from an object-oriented method. The article introduces the main phases of the analysis: Domain definition, object modeling, state modeling, and content modeling. The application of the methodology in the case project and the data gathering methods used are also described."

Abstract: "The SASOUT table model was developed to support the tabular documentation needs of the Publications Division of SAS Institute Inc. SASOUT instances contain sufficient meta information to allow them to be presented in both hard and soft copy. The meta data also makes possible non-traditional and interactive online presentations of the tabular data.

In 1995, research on tables produced by SAS software and on the tables previously used in our documentation resulted in our identification of four table types: simple, intersection, drill-down, and show-all. Imaging these tables on paper, as in the past, presented no significant problems even with SGML source data. However, we anticipated problems presenting our tables in soft copy after experimenting with the capabilities of the CALS table model, which was supported by our SGML software tools.

The CALS model does not support markup for indicating relationships between cells in a table nor directly support row header formatting. These relationships are not critical for producing hard copy, but are very important to our interactive online presentations. Header formatting is important for both hard copy and online presentations from a single source.

The SASOUT table model was developed to provide a means of marking up our tabular data while preserving its characteristics. The markup supports row headers and cell relationships in addition to all CALS features, such as column heads, spanning rows and columns, and alignment of data. The SASOUT model also supports behavior characteristics that allow the specification of online presentation methods.

This paper describes our table types, our platform presentation requirements, extensions we added to the CALS model, and the processing we designed to meet our formatting requirements so far.

The SASOUT DTD is freely available and we look forward to vendors providing support for it and other table DTD's that provide the means to fully identify tabular data."

Abstract: "Unlocking the benefits of information in your documents may mean that you invest more than human resources, money and equipment. What about the pre-process planning time? Investment in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) does not guarantee you immediate return and does not happen at the drop of a hat without a major management investment in pre-planning.

Because most corporations information management's top goal is to produce a much richer information environment, we must make a management commitment to a document analysis process. The process should identify what information in these documents is important enough to migrate to a rich electronic format such as SGML. It may seem obvious that the way to maximize your information is to break it into intelligible chunks in a data base. However, to get those chunks of information into a format that is acceptable by most applications is not a simple process. When that is complete, next comes the targeted conversion by document type.

For Learning Support the goal was to establish an information database that yielded benefits in the area of:

• document creation,
• document updating and revising,,
• database review and validation,
• information reuse, and,
• on-line full-text retrieval and distribution of information.,

The objective was to convert annually some 300,000 pages of technical documents containing complex tables and graphics from several different authoring environments into an industry standard Document Type Definition (DTD), called the Telecommunications Industry Markup (TIM DTD).

This industry standard format, Telecommunication's Industry Markup Document Type Definition (TIMDTD) is an explicit and neutral form of markup. The BCCs, in conjunction with the Telecommunications Industry Forum consisting of representatives from telecommunication vendors, such as Ericson, Siemens, AT&T, and Northern Telecom have unanimously endorsed it as their standard list of SGML markup tag definitions.

This paper identifies key learnings grasped from project management of the SGML Implementation Plan the Learning Support organization at Bellcore. Key outcomes determined were:

1. Document analysis was critical to the success of the [project]
2. The DTD writer's interpretation of the data and its structure required an iterative process with document developers and users. DTDs will change.
3. It was important for acceptance to maintain the document developers view of the textual layout and format of the data while enforcing structure.
4. Management's buy-in was needed at all points in the process
5. Not everyone will be on board the train at the same time."

Abstract: DAPHNE is a document processing system implemented to support joint editing within the German Research Network DFN. It is based on two international standards in the area of document and graphics processing, the Standard Generalized Markup Language SGML and the Computer Graphics Metafile CGM. This paper presents the functionality offered by DAPHNE today as well as plans for future extensions. It also describes the experience gained with a distributed environment of commercial products for processing SGML documents in general and DAPHNE documents in particular.

Abstract: "SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is designed to encode information at the content level, abstracting away from formatting issues. In a well-designed SGML application, font details are not part of the SGML document, and contents may be rearranged or automatically generated. In this light, for professional purposes HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is better considered to be a presentation language for contents that have been stored separately (e.g. in a dedicated SGML environment) than a reliable repository data storage format in itself. This now probably well understood, at least in the SGML community. HTML is tied to a particular, very limited DTD (even ignoring the reality of emerging Microsoft and Netscape dialects), and requires independently specified semantics (i.e. how the Web browser has to interpret the HTML tags)."

"In general, SGML documents will be typeset using informal descriptions of the style semantics for the various elements that occur in a document instance, which requires good communication between the document publisher and the document typesetter. Once a system is set up to process a particular kind of SGML input, that style specification is generally not portable.

"The new ISO standard DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language) aims to become the standard way of linking up SGML information containers with their graphical representation, as part of a suite of complementary ISO standards: SGML, HyTime, SPDL (Standard Page Description Language, based in part on the PostScript language from Adobe). This paper will elaborate on the details of how DSSSL achieves this, how it fits into a complete document production process, how detailed the specification is and what it leaves open, what other functionality is available, and why it was worth waiting for."

Abstract: "Increasing requirements in development documentation for automotive manufacturers such as the number of world-wide development sites (leading to the support of different languages); the speed of the development cycle; and the number of variants of products (re-use of base documentation), has led to the definition of exchange formats for information. This paper examines how SGML technology can be a good solution for problems in this area." [from the published program]

"The development of ECU (electronic control unit) for cars is a highly parallel and complex job. Requirements from different parts of an automotive manufacturer have to be fulfilled. The interfaces between correlated persons are not defined in a way, that an exchange of information is done easily. Business process reengineering activities discovered a big potential for enhancements by using SGML technology as an overall exchange format in these areas.

"Several projects were started, to implement a new process model. This article describes our experiences in projects we realized since the beginning of 1995. The biggest project deals with diagnosis data that is needed to describe parameters to communicate with ECUs. Today you can get many informations about the actual state of internal and external variables of ECUs (for example a coolant temperature). These informations are used to guide a diagnosis process to determine erroneous behaviour of components of a car. The diagnosis data is used in different parts of the company (development, production, service). Even companies that deliver ECUs can be involved in this process. We started a case study to determine the best format for the description of structures. As a result we decided to take SGML. The Document Type Structure (DTD) is presented to the ASAM/ASAP consortium for standardization. This consortium represents the German automotive industry, suppliers and tool companies.

"The system is now in use by 10 to 15 users and will grow in 1997 to 30 to 50 users. There is a process of standardization of diagnosis data in the moment in a consortium called ASAM/ASAP. Our DTD is a proposal to that committee and we think it will be fixed till the end of 1997. Our experience with the technologie SGML are quite good. We can transport the concept very easily to the users.

Abstract: "The aviation industry has a long tradition for information interchange standardization. The first generation of on-line documentation was a paper document duplicate based on SGML. In the future, documentation has to move from the document paradigm to an information paradigm. Then the user will get an 'Information Web' and exactly the information he is looking for. This presentation looks at the challenges and trends in aircraft maintenance documentation."

"In aircraft maintenance and operations documentation structure and form are well defined by the ATA SPEC 100 specification. It was a good foundation bringing that documentation into electronic form using SGML. SGML is today the foundation for ATA SPEC 2100, the aviation standard for electronic document interchange. [...] Tagged information at a well defined granularity makes incremental revisions easy. Taking advantage of the progress in electronic networks, an on-line document update will be possible and leads to totally new worksharing concepts between aircraft manufacturers product support organization and airline engineering."

Abstract: "Most Document Management System architectures can be categorized by the ability to handle and organize information of different kinds. Supporting information based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) involves unique requirements that bear on the tasks of managing structured documents."

"This report overviews approaches to support SGML documents in a number of Document Management System architectures that were candidates to be used in an actual publishing system supporting the publishing and re-purposing of shared information for technical manuals. This publishing system supports content- and presentation-oriented SGML documents for a supplier of military equipment to a Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) Project Office."

Abstract: "Stylesheets have been used to convert the document type of SGML documents. With a stylesheet, a document conforming to a source grammar can be transformed into a document conforming to a target grammar. The paper discusses the following problem: given a stylesheet, a source and a target SGML grammar, is it decidable whether or not all documents conforming to the source grammar are transformed into documents conforming to the target grammar? Using context free extended context free grammars we give a decision procedure for this problem."

"Introduction: In the past year, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) has done more to popularize the notion of Standard Generalized Markup Language than any single preceding use of SGML. Used on the World Wide Web through a graphical client such as Netscape or NCSA Mosaic, HTML documents and their associated image, sound, and digital video files result in sophisticated network publications and services. And even when viewed through the plain text (VT100) client Lynx, HTML files can still be exciting clusters of interlinked documents.

In common with Internet users all over the world, the University of Virginia Library now uses and produces HTML documents; unlike most other academic institutions, however, we came to HTML with practical experience in another, more sophisticated, form of SGML -- that of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. For two years the Electronic Text Center has been using the TEI Guidelines, through several drafts, to tag and distribute hundreds of electronic texts. The purpose of this paper is both to explain how we are using these various forms of SGML mark-up to publish a variety of documents, and to sound a cautionary note about the wholesale use of HTML as a primary authoring language."

Abstract: "The Electronic Text Center is both a physical space within the university library, open to all University of Virginia members and also an on-line collection of many thousands of Internet-accessible texts and images. It is important to us that we perform two tasks simultaneously in order to build our digital library: we are both creating a set of electronic resources, and also creating a user community for it, by training our users to become effective consumers and producers of electronic texts and images. Since 1992, the Etext Center has made available hardware and software for the creation and analysis of electronic texts; it provides training for these new tools and techniques; it acts as a focal point for HTML and SGML development in the humanities at Virginia; and it provides a place in which to use those texts that are not yet accessible on the Internet."

Abstract: "One of the most exciting applications of SGML which has emerged in the recent years is its use in document databases. The structural information embedded in SGML documents makes it possible to query SGML documents and extract information in an automatic manner; however, this querying process has not been standardized. As a result, different SGML database implementations use their own query language syntax, thus making the migration from one system to another a difficult process. In the relational database domains, however, the query language SQL has been a standard for over ten years and is universally used in most relational database systems. Although originally designed for relational databases, SQL is quite powerful for specifying complex queries in a relatively easy-to-understand syntax. With a small set of extensions to take advantage of the hierarchical structure of SGML, SQL can be easily adapted for use with SGML document databases (TAG-496).

The powerful 'generalized' nature of SGML makes it easy to implement SQL as an SGML DTD, so that queries can be expressed as document instances of the SQL DTD. Current SGML authors and users can write queries expressed in this DTD without learning a different language or using a separate editor. Moreover, because of the portable nature of SGML, these queries can be used in any SGML database system and can be converted to regular SQL for use in a relational or Object-Relational/Object-Oriented database system, if necessary. Databases that support the SQL DTD can also store the queries without any extra effort, and subsequently query them for inferring optimization parameters.

This paper presents a representative DTD for the SQL query language, with extensions for use with hierarchically structured documents. It also compares this language with languages proposed and implemented, including SDQL - the query language in the DSSSL standard (DSSSL95). This paper explains the advantages of using this language as a query language in document database systems and the necessity for standardizing the querying process in document databases. Finally, it discusses some implementation issues and complexity measures."

Abstract: "A method for augmenting an SGML document repository with database functionality is presented. SGML (ISO 8879,1986) has been widely accepted as a standard language for writing text with added structural information that gives the text greater applicability. Recently there has been a trend to use this structural information as meta-data in databases. The complex structure of documents, however, makes it difficult to directly map the structural information in documents to database structures. In particular, the flat nature of relational databases makes it extremely difficult to model documents that are inherently hierarchical in nature. Consequently, documents are modeled in object-oriented databases (Abiteboul, Cluet, & Milo, 1993), and object-relational databases (Hoist, 1995), in which SGML documents are mapped into the corresponding database models and are later reconstructed as necessary. However, this mapping strategy is not natural and can potentially cause loss of information in the original SGML documents. Moreover, interfaces for building queries for current document databases are mostly built on form-based query techniques and do not use the 'look and feel' of the documents. This article introduces an implementation method for a complex-object modeling technique specifically for SGML documents and describes interface techniques tailored for text databases. Some of the concepts for a Structured Document Database Management System (SDDBMS) specifically designed for SIL documents are described. A small survey of some current products is also presented to demonstrate the need for such a system."

Abstract: "Up to now SGML has tended to be used primarily in technical publishing applications, usually at a departmental level. However, with today's focus on web-based enterprise information management, and the recent introduction of XML, many more opportunities for SGML have become apparent. This whitepaper surveys the current state of the information industry, from both a business and technical point of view, and shows how SGML and XML technology can and should be positioned within an organization's overall I/T and intranet strategy."

"Abstract: While the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is intended to offer freedom from vendor-dependent data, it is difficult to translate arbitrary SGML into multiple output formats. To address this problem, we have incorporated translation capabilities into the SGML Grammar Builder project."

"Abstract: While there is now an international standard for mathematical markup, no systems produce formatted documents from the complete standard. This report describes how mathematical markup is translated at OCLC."

Abstract: "In recent digital library systems or the World Wide Web environment, many documents are beginning to be provided in the structured format, tagged in mark up languages like SGML or XML. Hence, indexing and query evaluation of structured documents have been drawing attention since they enable to access and retrieve a certain part of documents easily. However, conventional information retrieval techniques do not scale up well in structured documents. This paper suggests an efficient indexing and query evaluation scheme for structured documents (named BUS) that minimizes the indexing overhead and guarantees fast query processing at any level in the document structure. The basic idea is that indexing is performed at the lowest level of the given structure and query evaluation computes the similarity at a higher level by accumulating the term frequencies at the lowest level in the bottom up way. The accumulators summing up the similarity play the role of accumulating all the term frequencies of the related part at a certain level. This paper also addresses the implementation of BUS and proves that BUS works correctly. In addition, along with several experiments, it shows that BUS facilitates efficient indexing in terms of space and time and guarantees the reasonable retrieval time in response to user queries."

"This paper proposes an indexing and query evaluation scheme (named BUS - Bottom Up Schenze) for structured documents that minimizes the indexing overhead and guarantees fast query response time. The basic idea is that indexing is performed at the leaf elements of the given structure and query evaluation computes the similarity at higher level by accumulating the weights at the lowest level in the bottom up way. It underlies the result of R. Wilkinson that 'the retrieval of whole documents can he carried out effectively using just their parts' in part and the idea of UID (Unique element IDentifier) that enables to compute ancestor element of a given element fast."

"Abstract: The technical terminology used by the technical communicator or technical translator is encountered in texts. The terms in the texts are not randomly arranged but are used deliberately to invoke specific concept structures. SGML encoders and parsers can be used to identify and retrieve terminological structures in texts and help translators and terminologists better understand the relationship of terms in their textual context to abstract concept systems and knowledge organization." [abstract from author]

Summary: "In 'The Web Is Ruined and I Ruined It' self-proclaimed HTML Terrorist David Siegel discusses how proper separation of structure (HTML), style (CSS), and semantics (XML) makes content more compelling and design more effective."

Abstract: "Making data sharing work in a publishing system is not as easy as it sounds. There is much to take into consideration. I plan on discussing key points and factors that will enable you to have a better understanding of the concept of sharing data. I will also discuss what things need to be considered in deciding whether or not to share data. Also, key components will be defined as what is needed to make sharing data successful. Real life experience implementing SGML database systems that have the capability of sharing data is the basis of the following discussion."

Abstract: In this article the author argues that computer systems, like their users, need to be multilingual. "We need computers, operating systems, and programs that can potentially work in any language and can simultaneously work with many language at the same time." The article proposes a conceptual framework for achieving this goal.

Section 1, "Establishing the baseline," focuses on the problem of graphic rendering and illustrates the range of phenomena which an adequate solution to computational rendering of writing systems must account for. These include phenomena like nonsequential rendering, movable diacritics, positional variants, ligatures, conjuncts, and kerning.

Section 2, "A general solution to the complexities of character rendering," proposes a general solution to the rendering of scripts that can be printed typographically. (The computational rendering of calligraphic scripts adds further complexities which are not addressed.) The author first argues that the proper modeling of writing systems requires a two-level system in which a functional level is distinguished from a formal level. The functional level is the domain of characters (which represent the underlying information units of the writing system). The formal level is the domain of graphs (which represent the distinct graphic signs which appear on the surface). The claim is then made that all the phenomena described in section 1 can be handled by mapping from characters to graphs via finite-state transducers - simple machines guaranteed to produce results in linear time. A brief example using the Greek writing system is given.

Section 3, "Toward a conceptual model for multilingual computing," goes beyond graphic rendering to consider the requirements of a system that would adequately deal with other language-specific issues like keyboarding, sorting, transliteration, hyphenation, and the like. The author observes that every piece of textual data stored in a computer is expressed in a particular language, and it is the identity of that language which determines how the data should be rendered, keyboarded, sorted, and so on. He thus argues that a rendering-centered approach which simply develops a universal character set for all languages will not solve the problem of multilingual computing. Using examples from the world's languages, he goes on to define language, script, and writing system as distinct concepts and argues that a complete system for multilingual computing must model all three.

Abstract: "This paper develops a solution to the problem of importing existing SGML data into an existing object-oriented database schema without changing the SGML data or the database schema. After investigating the general problem of where the mismatch lies between the SGML model and the object model, the paper proposes a solution based on architectural processing. Two meta-DTDs are used, one to define the architectural forms for the object model and another to map the existing SGML data onto those forms."

"Much of the promise of SGML lies in the fact that descriptively marked up data can be used by multiple applications. Given the fact that an SGML DTD has much in common with the conceptual model that results from an object-oriented analysis of a problem domain, it is logical to conclude that SGML data should be particularly amenable to being imported into software that uses an object-oriented data model. This is not a trivial task, however, since there are some fundamental differences between the SGML model of data and the object model.

"The paper explores this general problem as it develops a solution to a more specific problem, namely, how to import existing SGML data into an existing object-oriented database schema without changing either the SGML data or the database schema. The target system is an object-oriented database system named CELLAR (for Computing Environment for Linguistic, Literary, and Anthropological Research). The solution uses architectural processing to map the SGML data onto architectural forms that the CELLAR system can use to construct the appropriate structure of objects."

Abstract: "The large SGML DTDs in widespread use (e.g. HTML, DocBook, CALS, EAD, TEI) offer the advantage of standardization, but for a particular project they often carry the disadvantage of being too large or too general. A given project might be better served by a DTD that is no bigger than is needed to solve the specific problem at hand, and that is even customized to meet special requirements of the problem domain. Furthermore, the project might prefer for the data it produces to meet the different syntactic constraints of XML conformity. This paper demonstrates how architectural processing can be used to develop a problem-specific XML DTD for a particular project without losing the advantage of conforming to a widely used SGML DTD. As an example, the paper develops a small XML application derived from the Text Encoding Initiative DTD. The TEI Guidelines offer a mechanism for building TEI-conformant applications; the paper concludes by proposing an alternative approach to TEI conformance based on architectures."

Abstract: "This paper describes a database system developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics to be truly multilingual. It is named CELLAR--Computing Environment for Linguistics, Literary, and Anthropological Research. After elaborating some of the key problems of multilingual computing (section 1), the paper gives a general introduction to the CELLAR system (section 2). CELLAR's approach to multilingualism is then described in terms of six facets of multilingual computing (section 3). The remaining sections of the paper describe details of how CELLAR supports multilingual data processing by presenting the conceptual models for the on-line definitions of multilingual resources."

Abstract: "The abilities to deliver vast amounts of corporate information on-line in real time, with sophisticated hypertext navigation aids, and the accelerating system complexity of products and corporate processes have converged to drive a new paradigm: component-based documentation development. The microdocument architecture is a vendor-independent hybrid of SGML and RDBMS methodologies that enables the delivery of personalized virtual documents. Illustrations of successful virtual document implementations and an overview of business and project leader implementation issues are provided."

Abstract: The paper shows how the document description standard SGML can be applied in software development. It is shown how this can be advantageous when building applications of SGML.

Abstract: "As the SGML community continues to grow, users are seeking new support structures, new sources of information, new technology, and new ways of applying SGML. The result is a number of emerging SGML interest groups, not just around the U.S., but around the world. Just over a year ago, I helped revive the defunct Rocky Mountain SGML Users' Group in Colorado. The journey to a strong, productive users' group has been long, and not without hurdles. However, the benefits are many for everyone involved, and the learning experiences have been invaluable. This paper presents ten good reasons to start an SGML users' group, who should be involved in organizing a users' group, how to get started on the right foot, what people can expect to happen during different stages of users' group development, common problems that tend to crop up and how to deal with them effectively, and the dos and don'ts of managing a users' group.

"Abstract: Computers and associated devices are used increasingly for the input of copy on a word processor or other text entry system; perhaps sending a copy to a reference who may return an edited form, possibly using a floppy disk; and maybe for this copy to have codes inserted in it before its publication. In general, these codes have related to specific typesetters: they are device-dependent. But generic codes could be inserted, giving increases flexibility. The changing face of publishing is examined, not only computer-assisted publishing and electronic publishing but above all database publishing. Its relevance to publishers in the more traditional sense and those involved with in-house publishing is considered. The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is presented as the solution."

"Abstract: The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) received the seal of approval of member bodies of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and its publication as an international standard is expected at the end of 1986. It is a standard for full-text data base publishing where this includes computer-assisted publishing and electronic publishing. The methodology is such that the marked up text may be exploited to produce a multiplicity of products from the same data base, the markup being such that the text can be printed or displayed at will in a variety of styles. Application of generic coding methods will give rise to greater freedom in publishing where there can be exploitation of a corporate data base. Information is given on the way some of the sectors in the information market are taking up SGML. How SGML may be applied by means of a starter document type is described, where this may readily be modified or extended dependent on the specific application."

Abstract: "The Portable Document Format (PDF), defined by Adobe Systems Inc. as the basis of its Acrobat product range, is discussed in some detail. Particular emphasis is given to its flexible object-oriented structure, which has yet to be fully exploited. It is currently used to represent not logical structure but simply a series of pages and associated resources."

"A definition of an Encapsulated PDF (EPDF) is presented, in which EPDF blocks carry with them their own resource requirements, together with geometrical and logical information. A block formatter called Juggler is described which can lay out EPDF blocks from various sources onto new pages. Future revisions of PDF supporting uniquely-named EPDF blocks tagged with semantic information would assist in composite-page makeup and could even lead to fully revisable PDF."

Abstract: "Authoring in SGML is difficult and time consuming. Creating SGML documents is costly and complex. Although many of the SGML authoring tools available provide superior SGML functionality, many are not intuitive. This paper will discuss Novell's approach to creating structured hypertext documents intuitively and efficiently by integrating and customizing current database and SGML authoring technologies. The main goal of the system Novell developed is to optimize the authors ability to create and manage structured content.

"The focus of the presentation will be a demonstration of the tool Novell developed to solve many of these problems.

Abstract: "The OpenTag format proposes to use the power of an open standard (XML) to access valuable information hidden away in private-format files. One of the primary benefits of using the OpenTag format to leverage information is that you don't have to change anything about the way you're currently working. Users of FrameMaker or Interleaf can continue to author and publish in their familiar environments, and still benefit without ever converting to a complete SGML/XML solution. Of course, certain tweaks to your development techniques can maximize your return on information investment. One of the biggest challenges is to efficiently access text when it's embedded within code and other non-textual data in a multitude of different formats, so using a standard method of marking up that extracted text can greatly boost the efficiency with which it can be consistently reused.

"The OpenTag Initiative is a working group in which both localization customers and their suppliers are defining a standard that will support open data encoding methods during the localization process, and permit robust data interchange between suppliers and customers. The OpenTag format is a single common markup format to encode text extracted from documents of varying and arbitrary formats. By abstracting a file's heterogeneous formatting information into OpenTag markup, you can produce homogeneously tagged text files, regardless of the original file format. Rather than converting information from 'format X' into the OpenTag format, data are extracted from 'format X', manipulated in an OpenTag environment, and later merged back into the 'format X' file."

"Abstract: The configuration of the actual document produced when a generically marked-up virtual document is formatted depends on rules of composition which govern the action of the formatting system, as well as on the presentation rules associated with the document. Rules of composition are of two kinds: spacing rules and rules of orthography. Statements of such rules in compositors' manuals from the era of metal-type composition are quoted, and their underlying rationales discussed. The application of rules of cmposition by present-day document formatting systems depends on the explicit delimitation of compositional environments in generically marked-up documents, and on the systems' ability to deal explicitly with visual structure."

Summary: "The major themes of the conference will be recapitulated with observations on the state of the SGML/XML world. Observations on important or telling events at the conference will be interspersed with opinions on their significance." [watch this space for a link to a published summary]

"Abstract: This paper describes the goals and work of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an international cooperative project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchange of electronic text for research purposes. It begins by outlining some basic problems that arise in the attempt to represent textual material in computers and some problems that arise in the attempt to encourage the sharing and reuse of electronic textual resources. These problems provide the necessary background for a brief review of the origins and organization of the Text Encoding Initiative itself. Next, the paper describes the rationale for the decision of the TEI to use the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) as the basis for its work. Finally, the work accomplished by the TEI is described in general terms, and some attempt is made to clarify what the project has and has not accomplished."

Abstract: "The new paradigm of information objects has recently emerged that replaces the old one of documents. The new view on information concentrates on smaller bits of information which may be connected in different contexts and that are linked and webbed together under multiple perspectives."

"This paper focuses on the techniques and applications that are available already to produce and maintain information webs. We discuss the fact that many authors and publishers are writing books as they have been doing for the last 500 years. Partly it seems to us to be the publishers and authors turn now to redefine their methods, their products and their markets. What are the new opportunities, what abilities and skills are needed, and what are the problems in the shift to a new way of writing and publishing?

Abstract: "There are many advantages to breaking up complete documents into small, relatively discreet chunks or 'text modules': multiple authors can more easily work on the same document, the text modules could be served up individually as part of an on-line help or performance support system, and the modules can be reused in other documents. But how can we reuse modules between different documents with some assurances that they fit the new context? How will we track the dependencies between modules? In short, how will we address the increased complexity of managing a library of text modules? In the spirit of reuse, this paper explores two fields of research in the software engineering community that might be able to provide some answers to these questions: module interconnection languages and faceted classification."

Abstract: In 1994, our Publications Division at the SAS Institute began converting our in-house publishing system. The conversion involved evaluating, selecting and implementing a new publishing system that would take advantage of the SGML paradigm for content markup. Components of the system include an SGML-based editor, routines for one-time conversions of legacy text to SGML, filters for dynamic conversions of SGML text and of graphics to various output formats, a document management system, and customizations that tailor third-party components to fit our environment. Along with new tools, we had to implement the new processes which we designed as we analyzed our documents and workflow for the new system. This paper explores our experiences from the time we began deciding to implement a new publishing system to now, when we have successfully implemented a significant portion of the new SGML-based system with working tools and prototyped processes."

Abstract: "We explore a new structure of input specifications for document generators based on the micro-document approach. The structure is based on the intentional properties of texts. We focus on the writers' intentions and readers' need to be informed, besides the actual content of the document. The generator processes the specification, and decides on the appropriate actions needed to create a document in accordance to the plan. The intentional properties can be marked up using SGML. Some examples are provided."

"[Conclusion]: We believe that the main benefits of using the intentional approach for document structuring in generation, consist in giving an increased awareness of the underlying nature of documentation. In any authoring activity, these matters are very important. If you are careless you will not get the message across, and the documentation will not be used. We have also made a point about distinguishing generic information from product specific information. It allows for a generalization of the generation problem and better opportunities for re-use."

In 1991, Ericsson Inc. began implementing Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) in their Customer Documentation Department in Richardson, Texas. An SGML working environment for procedural documentation was created first. The second SGML working environment was developed internally for descriptive documents and was based on the first. A user's guide working environment was developed in 1994 which was different than anything done in the past. A system was also put in place for maintaining these SGML environments. Customer Documentation's SGML expertise has enabled it to be in the forefront for SGML implementation in other company groups and also to sell its services in SGML document production."

Abstract: "Many companies are required to deliver documentation to customers electronically. As a significant step in solving Electronic Document Delivery (EDD) issues, the telecommunications industry has developed an interchange DTD and a packaging guideline that provide a common 'language' for expressing document content and logical structure. Documents created on any system may be translated to this 'language' by document producers, and from this 'language' to any display or production system by document recipients. Although the interchange DTD and packaging guideline were designed by telecommunications industry, they are general enough to be directly used or slightly modified to meet EDD requirements in other industries as well."

Abstract: "In realizing an SGML-based document processing system, it is required to transform the document structure and/or the data representation, from a source document written in SGML, to data in the format required by the application. In real-world, there is a problem that this transformation often becomes very complex. To solve this problem of complexity, we designed a programming language for SGML transformation (down translation) and implemented its processor. (This language is currently called "Æsop.")

The Æsop processor works on a parsed tree structure (ESIS structure), which is the output of an SGML parser. The processor automatically traverses the ESIS tree structure in depth-first order, selects and executes a script for each node.

To realize the complex transformation with a simple and straightforward program, we designed Æsop as a language which has following features: (1) Ability to select a script for a node, according to any complex condition satisfied by the node. (2) A rich set of built-in functions which enables to modify the document structure itself. (3) Ability to construct a 'process pipeline.' A 'process' is a set of scripts applied to the document tree structure through one traversal action. With Æsop, programmers can divide a complex transformation program to a series of simple processes. A typical Æsop program consists of one or more tree conversion processes and one data output process.

With a prototype processor of Æsop, we succeeded to transform a complex SGML document (written according to a DTD which is very similar to the ISO/IEC TR 9573-11 DTD) to LaTeX. Through this work, we had confirmed the effectiveness of Æsop for transformation from SGML documents containing complex math expressions and tables."

Abstract: "Two recent proposals for meta-applications of XML (XML-Data and MCF) have included DTD fragments for describing document structure, sometimes called 'schemata'. In this paper I describe the XML-Data schemata proposal, concentrating on the motivation for and nature of the provision of an element-type hierarchy, in which element types can inherit attribute declarations and positions in content models from ancestors in the hierarchy. I argue that this represents a major improvement over the use of parameter entities to structure and maintain DTDs."

"Complex document types require rich and complex structural markup. SGML provides powerful mechanisms for defining the grammar of such markup, with element type and attribute declarations in the document type definition (DTD). The structure of the DTD itself, however, finds no explicit expression in SGML. The fact that element types are related in a structured fashion can only be represented implicitly, e.g., through the use of parameter entities. There is a real need, for ease of understanding and ease of maintenance, to address this issue. [...] The only coherent development policy in my view is to introduce things into the schema DTD which we know how to translate into vanilla XML. Not only does this guarantee inter-operability in the limit, but the translation serves to define the semantics of each part of the schema DTD in a concrete and unequivocal way."

Abstract: "There are at least three reasons why separating markup from the material marked up ('standoff annotation') may be an attractive proposition: 1) The base material may be read-only and/or very large, so copying it to introduce markup may be unacceptable; 2) The markup may involve multiple overlapping hierarchies; 3) Distribution of the base document may be controlled, but the markup is intended to be freely available.

"In this paper, two kinds of semantics for hyperlinks are addressed to facilitate this type of annotation, and describe the LT NSL toolset that supports these semantics. The two kinds of hyperlink semantics that are described are (a) inclusion, where one includes a sequence of SGML elements from the base file; and (b) replacement, where one provides a replacement for material in the base file, incorporating everything else. The speakers address the issue of different kinds of (HyTime and TEI) addressing schemes by means of SGML identifiers, URLs, and character offsets into non-SGML data. We also address the issues of indexing large files to improve the speed of accessing SGML elements in the base files."

Abstract: "Too many people say 'tag' when they mean 'element'. While this might seem to be just semantic quibbling, the difference is actually important. The power of SGML-based processing lies precisely in the fact that an element is more than a tag. By examining three systems that exploit the power of SGML to allow sophisticated actions on content, this talk shows that understanding an element as more than just the tags that delimit it is a critical part of exploiting the full power of SGML."

Abstract: "Implementing SGML is a big task, and one of the obstacles to be overcome is the development of an appropriate DTD or suite of DTDs. In many industries, there are high-profile 'industry standard' DTDs (developed by an industry consortium or a formalized standards activity) which hold out the promise of DTD nirvana: all gain with no pain. To what extent can an industry standard DTD help you achieve your implementation goals? What pitfalls must you avoid in order to prevent this nirvana from becoming just another failed SGML implementation?"

Abstract: "IBM's TaskGuide technology gives Technical Writers and Human Factors professionals the ability to create wizards. Based on the premise that task analysis is the most difficult part of creating an effective wizard, our tools let you focus on design, not writing code.

"This paper discusses the basics of wizard technology, followed by a brief introduction to the XML-based system we have created. We cover some of the key design decisions we had to make, and introduce some of the unique features of our product. Finally, we demonstrate a recursive document, a wizard that creates another wizard."

Abstract: "This document presents the European Aquarelle project and the missions and the documentation system of the General Inventory. It then examines one of the first applications of this research project with Aquarelle project and the missions and the documentation system of the General Inventory. It then examines one of the first applications of this research project with SGML tagging of a digital version of Inventory archive folders dealing with France's monuments and art treasures."

"The technical and documentary specifications and standards selected are TCP/IP for internal and external networks, HTML for pages of text, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879) for digitised content folders and the Z39.50 request protocol for access to data bases, standards ISO 2788 and 5964 for drawing up monolingual and multilingual thesauri, and the CIMI (Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information) DTD and the Inventory DTD for applications respectively relating to museums/art galleries and monuments

"Abstract: In working on the New OED project, we, like many other researchers, have wrestled with large, intricate bodies of text. Based on this exposure, we have begun to investigate the similarities and differences between managing conventional business data and managing reference text data.

The paper begins with the claim that text can support complex models of the real world that cannot be captured more formally. Thus important information resources must be held as text, but the very absence of a formal model makes it difficult to identify the structures present in a text.

A common text structuring technique is descriptive markup, which introduces tags into a text stream. We present three views of tagged text: one based on tags as text, one on arbitrarily interleaved tags with text, and one on constrained tag placement in the text. Throughout the discussion, examples are drawn from our experience with the OED."

Abstract: "SGML is a great technology. It has attracted the attention of some pretty influential companies, which have found that they can save money, get to market faster, and increase the accuracy of their documentation by using SGML.

"However, SGML by itself it not the answer. SGML can only work if it is part of an intelligent document management environment that utilizes other appropriate technologies.

"This talk is about the mixing of SGML and other technologies, like relational and object-oriented databases, internet and intranet servers, email, voice mail, and external protocol servers, and other new and old technologies. It ends with a methodology, called 'microdocument architectures', that can pull all of these technologies together to create an intelligent document management environment.

"You will leave this session with a better understanding of where SGML can fit, and where it might not necessarily the best solution. You will have the ammunition to convince your company that SGML should be part of an intelligent document management system and how you might go about integrating SGML with other technologies."