Apologies for cross-posting. as ever!
On Tue, 3 Jul 2001 09:41:16 +0100 Robin Yeates 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:


> --- Apologies for cross-posting ---
> 
> The following newsletter for those in libraries, museums and archives
> interested in internet developments is now also mounted at
> http://www.covax.org.
> 
> COVAX News
> Issue 2 June 2001
> 
> 1. Making cultural resources accessible
> 
> Issue 1 of Covax News outlined the objectives of COVAX (Contemporary
> Culture Virtual Archive in XML). A key part of the project involves
> bringing together and searching distributed databases using
> fast-developing open standards based on XML (eXtensible Markup
> Language). How does Covax intend to describe the collections included in
> the service? How are we addressing the need for resource discovery in
> multiple languages?
> 
> A key part of the Covax approach is the innovative use of an XML Explain
> database based on the concept of the Z39.50 Explain standard, used to
> describe System Details about servers, Content Provider details about
> organisations and XML-Repository details about databases and
> collections.
> 
> The descriptions, names, addresses, and support information for each
> site or database are marked up using XML, which provides a common
> structure for information provided by each of the partners. The records
> for the prototype are being centrally coordinated, so that for each a
> native language version is prepared and one in English. Then each
> partner is responsible for translating each record into their own
> language, according to a schedule of responsibilities allocated by the
> workpackage manager. If a partner fails to contribute their
> translations, a record is made available to the Covax system only in
> English or in those version that are available. It is hoped that
> partners will contribute Explain content records and translations
> promptly in order to ensure that their materials are easily accessible
> to the maximum number of users.
> 
> 2. PARTNER PROFILE: Residencia de Estudiantes
> 
> The Residencia de Estudiantes, founded in 1910 by the Junta Para
> Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas, is now a private
> foundation, created by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
> Científicas (CSIC) in December 1989. Originally a student residence, it
> became the primary cultural centre in Spain.  It is known as being the
> institution where Spaniards such as Federico García Lorca, Salvador
> Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Severo Ochoa, Miguel de Unamuno, Alfonso Reyes,
> Manuel de Falla, Juan Ramón Jiménez, José Ortega y Gasset, Pedro
> Salinas, Blas Cabrera, Eugenio d’Ors or Rafael Alberti, were living or
> were assiduous visitors. Furthermore, the Residencia was a forum for
> debate and dissemination of the intellectual life between 1910-1936.
> Albert Einstein, Paul Valéry, Marie Curie, Igor Stravinsky, John M.
> Keynes, Alexander Calder, Walter Gropius, Henri Bergson o Le Corbusier
> among others visited and shared their knowledge in the Residencia.
> 
> Since 1990 the Residencia is once again one of the most important
> cultural centres of Spain. Also the Residencia de Estudiantes is devoted
> to the recovery and dissemination of its historical legacy.  Hence, a
> unique collection of bibliographical and documentary resources
> specializing in the intellectual history and contemporary science of
> first third of the Twentieth Century can be consulted.  The personal
> archives of Luis Cernuda, Jesús Bal y Gay, Fernando de los Ríos, Manuel
> Altolaguirre y Concha Méndez o León Sánchez Cuesta and those of
> institutions such as the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e
> Investigaciones Científicas or the Museo Pedagógico Nacional stand out.
> A description of the documentary and bibliographical resources and a
> collection of images of the digitized documents are available at the
> Red de centros y archivo virtual de la Edad de Planta de la cultura
> española contemporánea (1868-1936), a project which is headed by the
> Residencia de Estudiantes and is financed by the Fundación Marcelino
> Botín. (website: http://www.achivovirtual.org)
> 
> The Residencia promotes research projects focusing on two main areas of
> activity: discovery and disclosure of the historical legacy of Spanish
> culture, and presentation and analysis of present trends in thought in
> order to explore the future of culture as we know it.
> 
> The Residencia de Estudiantes publishes critical editions of its
> historical texts and rescues exceptional testimonies such as the
> "Archivo de la Palabra" or the "Residencia" magazine.
> 
> 3. Review of XML Spy
> 
> by Fabrizio Poggi, ENEA, Rome
> 
> Introduction
> 
> XML Spy is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) environment from
> Altova GmbH & Altova used in the Covax project to manage and simplify
> the markup and editing tasks of users handling XML materials. Website:
> http://www.xmlspy.com/
> 
> XML
> 
> XML is a subset of the SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
> markup language, defined by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). XML is
> a free, non-proprietary standard that is likely in the near future to
> play an important part in the transfer, presentation, enrichment and
> standardization of computer data and transactions. Many IT companies now
> consider XML as crucial for the future development of innovative
> technologies.
> 
> It should be relatively straightforward to read, validate and edit XML
> code but the development of the related tools is still in progress. We
> can certainly work with XML, including use of open source tools (that
> for many of us seems a preferred option), but XML tools currently
> available are not particularly suitable or easy to use, especially
> compared with tools availabile for HTML, web authoring, java and
> JavaScript related, etc.
> 
> XML Spy 3.5 Premium version
> 
> -- please note that a 4.0 beta version of XML Spy is now available but
> not reviewed here --
> 
> XML Spy is not an open source IDE, but, from the point of view of
> usability and functionality for XML management, it seems to be an
> excellent choice, offering the necessary reliability for professional
> use. XML supports the full XML syntax, parsing, well-formedness,
> validation, encoding; DTD definition; schema definition; XSL and XSLT
> management; HTML and XHTML rules (this last is a superset of HTML4.0
> rules that adds to markup a more rigorous syntax and compatibility with
> XML environments); syntax highlighting; interoperability with other
> external applications (imports from Microsoft Word); some of ASP and
> BizTalk (untested).
> 
> The grid mode
> 
> In the Covax context, we use XML Spy for working with our source data in
> several modes. The XML graphical representation in XML Spy is called
> "Enhanced Grid View". Without a screenshot of this mode, think of it as
> a hierarchical view that allows easy reading and work on the structure
> of the XML source (structure intended as the tree of parents, child and
> sibling elements) and with field values encapsulated in the structure
> itself.
> 
> This working mode presents coloured fonts and cells that improve visual
> presentation (parameters can be customised by the user: font size, font
> colour, colour of selected and non selected elements). This mode gives
> the best idea of the structure. The benefits of this mode are mainly the
> ability to edit the hierarchical tree safely (the content of the tree
> elements is limited by the grid cells and users can't mistake content
> editing and structure editing) and to add, remove, change the location
> of elements and values shown using standard windows methods (drag and
> drop, copy, cut, paste).
> 
> XML Spy makes this work so easy that someone may accidentally move
> elements, so perhaps there should be a confirmation pop-up window for
> drag and drop events. However, the infinite undo mechanism should allow
> users to avoid accidental changes. At the time of writing we have come
> across a few small problems, related mainly to expansion of elements and
> scrolling grids containing cells with large amounts of texts inside, but
> these are just minor scrolling difficulties when viewing with a 1024x768
> screen resolution.
> 
> Text and browse mode
> 
> The alternative mode is text view, supplemented by a browser mode. We
> consider these last two as a single mode of working (as in most cases
> the user works on the text source switching continually to browser mode
> to verify the result of applied changes). In this mode the user has more
> control over the markup coding and can work directly with it, with the
> support of a useful auto-completion function and syntax highlighting.
> This mode is always active during editing and provides readability (the
> tags and the special parameters appear here in different colours) as
> well as reducing typing effort (XML tag pairs are closed auto-magically
> by the IDE and in HTML, where the tags are limited to a small subset, a
> window list appears on the cursor popping up with all possible
> completions for the typed code). Switching to browser view, the user can
> easily see the results of editing in a preview (almost identical to
> Internet Explorer display) of the HTML page.
> 
> The XML work
> 
> Our main work was loading, parsing and validating XML sources against a
> DTD. XML Spy first loads the entire source. When the xml file has been
> loaded, XML Spy verifies the well-formedness of the source using its
> internal parser. An incremental check of the syntax is applied, allowing
> the user to apply corrections and changes. This check also includes
> special characters and encoding.
> 
> The second phase is validation. When a DTD is specified in the XML
> source document, XML Spy also loads the DTD file and performs a check on
> rules and semantics, matching the DTD file (which contains all the
> rules) and the XML file (which contains a data structure and contents).
> At this stage it is also possible to make changes and corrections on the
> fly to complete the validation. Our experience of using this validation
> shows that the built-in parser conforms more closely to the Microsoft
> XML specifications, than to the full W3C XML standard. In some cases,
> XML source documents validated in XML Spy gave us problems with other
> validation systems. For example, the Tamino internal loader/parser
> detected errors in XML documents that had been fully validated in XML
> Spy.
> 
> Conclusions
> 
> XML Spy 3.5 Premium Version is a professional, stable tool for Windows
> 98, ME, Nt4 and Windows 2000 O/S. It has an attractive, intuitive
> interface well implemented using a small setup package. It is an ideal
> IDE environment for markup languages in specific contexts (e.g.: XML,
> XSL, XSLT, HTML, XHTML etc.). It is one of the first powerful tools
> available. XML editing benefits include auto completion, syntax
> highlighting, multiview environment, parsing, undo/redo infinite
> mechanism.
> 
> Despite the small package size, XML Spy requires a huge amount of
> physical memory and system resources (because of the undo/redo mechanism
> and the need to load documents fully into RAM memory). We have
> experienced some problems with large XML documents (10MB) on a Windows
> NT4 Workstation running on a Pentium II processor with 128 MB RAM. Other
> minor problems are: the management of tree expansions and window scroll
> bars when used in grid mode working on fields containing large amounts
> of text; some delays in text mode when typing in large files.
> 
> 4. Kulturerbe:online
> 
> By Georg Guentner, Salzburg Research, email:
> [log in to unmask]
> 
> Exploitation plans for COVAX in Austria start with a virtual catalogue
> for Austria's cultural heritage on the Internet.
> 
> One important issue arising with RTD projects carried out under the IST
> programme within the 5th Framework Programme is the development of
> exploitation strategies for the results achieved. COVAX (Contemporary
> Virtual Archives in XML, IST-1999-11820) provides mainly technological
> proof, that the upcoming XML standard is feasible as the basis of
> distributed cross-domain metadata-searching in the field of cultural
> heritage and as a communications interface within the component based
> application architecture.
> 
> Exploitation plans at Salzburg Research, one of the technology partners
> of the COVAX consortium, consider a strategy that starts from a service
> centred point of view. The "Kulturerbe:online" project ("cultural
> heritage online") aims to create a national service infrastructure, both
> organisational and technical, that provides a virtual catalogue of
> Austria's cultural heritage. COVAX components will be used for this,
> although they will have to be adapted, localised and further developed.
> 
> The main aim of the Kulturerbe:online project is to set up a virtual
> catalogue of the Austrian cultural heritage on the internet accessible
> from an ALM portal. A number of different cultural institutions
> (Museums, Libraries, Archives) will create a common platform for making
> their catalogues available to the public. Kulturerbe:online thus offers
> a comprehensive search engine for the Austrian cultural heritage. This
> search engine is not a substitute for existing catalogues, but instead
> makes these accessible via a single user interface and links to the more
> detailed catalogues of the partner institutions and their digital
> surrogates.
> 
> Kulturerbe:online is a pilot project, which proves by developing a
> network of participating partner institutions that it is possible to
> consolidate different standards of description and categorisation
> schemes to form a common platform and make resources searchable via a
> shared method. The participating cultural institutions provide parts of
> their digital catalogues and participate unremunerated as pilot-users in
> the project.
> 
> In later issues of this newsletter we will describe our plans to use the
> Kulturerbe:online portal as the starting place for search services and
> for information services from syndicated ALMs.  The Kulturerbe:online
> project is being carried out by Salzburg NewMediaLab, a national centre
> of competence for new media, and by a consortium of partners comprising
> amongst others AIT, Software AG Austria and the Austrian National
> Library.
> 
> Kulturerbe:online
> ·       Is developing a virtual catalogue of the Austrian cultural heritage
> ·       Offers a common and uniform view of Austrian cultural heritage
> ·       Makes references to the detailed catalogues of cultural institutions
> ·       Is developing the technical basis for the preservation of the
> catalogue of Austrian Heritage
> ·       Advises and assists institutions in the development of their own
> digital catalogues
> ·       Represents an important building block in the development of
> comprehensive e-services for museums, libraries and archives
> 
> 
> 5. COVAX EVENTS
> 
> Fifth ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing, Canterbury, UK
> 
> The main objective of COVAX is to test the use of XML to combine
> document descriptions and digitised surrogates of cultural documents to
> build a global system for search and retrieval, increasing accessibility
> via the Internet to electronic resources, regardless of their location.
> 
> COVAX's approach to achieving its objectives is based on the conversion
> of existing records to homogeneously-encoded document descriptions of
> bibliographic records, archive finding aids, museum records and
> catalogues, and electronic texts and on the application of XML
> (eXtensible Markup Language) and the various Document Type Definitions
> (DTDs) currently being used for library resource descriptions (MARC
> DTD), archives finding aids (EAD), museum materials (AMICO DTD) and
> electronic versions of cultural texts (TEIlite).
> 
> The conversion process has proved to be a crucial one in the
> COVAX-project and we therefore try to disseminate our experiences of
> converting existing data at seminars, workshops and conferences.
> 
> One such event is the Fifth ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic
> Publishing to be held in Canterbury, UK 5-7 July 2001 The conference
> will be concerned with electronic publishing both for specialist
> audiences and for the general public. There will be two parallel tracks.
> The first track will include case studies, presentations of projects and
> presentations of implemented electronic publishing solutions in public
> and scholarly libraries, publishers, museums, etc. It will also include
> electronic provision of local community or tourist information,
> government information, and the like.
> 
> The second track will concentrate on technical issues such as file
> formats, retrieval issues, etc. A major underlying theme of the
> ICCC/IFIP Electronic Publishing conferences is the promotion of an
> 'exchange of experience' between the participants - especially between
> academics researching in the area, and publishers and others with
> practical experience. All papers are refereed to ensure high quality.
> 
> The Covax paper written for the conference (Friday the 6th of July
> 13:30) is entitled "Converting heterogenous cultural catalogues and
> documents to XML - strategies and solutions of the Covax project", by
> Francisca Hernández, Peter Linde, Bob Mulrenin and Robin Yeates,
> presented by Robin Yeates. (http://library.ukc.ac.uk/iccc/2001)
> 
> First Austrian Metadata Seminar, Vienna, Austria
> 
> Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur, Vienna 18 May
> 2001
> 
> This event organized by CSC Austria and the Bundesminsterium für
> Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur reviewed metadata and current European
> XML developments for museums, libraries and archives, including COVAX,
> presented by Georg Guentner of Salzburg Research. The event has a
> website at http://www.cscaustria.at/events/eu0006.htm that includes
> presentations and a short summary by Michael Day of UKOLN.
> 
> 
> OTHER COVAX EVENTS
> 
> First Italian Workshop  "XML e Conoscenza" Podere d'Ombriano - Crema,
> Italy
> 29th-30th June, 2001
> http://kaos.crema.unimi.it/xml
> An experience in XML: the COVAX project -  L. Bordoni
> 
> Workshop on "Artificial Intelligence for the Cultural Heritage and
> Digital Libraries - Bari, Italy
> 25th September, 2001
> http://www.di.uniba.it/~aiia/english.html
> The Covax project- L. Bordoni
> 
> Society of Archivists' Annual Conference "Safeguarding our culture' -
> Aberystwyth, UK
> 4-7 September, 2001
> http://www.archives.org.uk/conf/aberystwyth.html
> COVAX - Contemporary culture visual archives in XML - Robin Yeates (5
> September, 2001)
> 
> 
> 6. MORE ABOUT Covax
> A website has been established in Catalan, English, German, Italian,
> Spanish, and Swedish at http://www.covax.org, where you can find other
> issues of Covax News and other information about the project. Carlos
> Wert, the project Coordinator and Francisca Hernández have published an
> introductory article on Covax in Cultivate Interactive Issue 3 January
> 2001 (http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/covax/).
> 
> 7. CONTACTS
> Project coordinator
> Carlos Wert, Residencia de Estudiantes, Pinar, 23, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> URL: http://www.covax.org
> 
> Dissemination
> Robin Yeates, LASER, Robin Yeates, Assistant Director: Research &
> Development, LASER, 4th Floor, Gun Court, 70 Wapping Lane, London E1W
> 2RS, United Kingdom.
> Tel: +44 (020) 7702 2020
> Fax: +44 (020) 7702 2019
> email: [log in to unmask]
> URL: http://www.viscount.org.uk/research/covax/
> 
> 
> Rights and disclaimer
> ---------------------
> COVAX is part funded by the European Commission.
> 
> The authors are solely responsible for the content of this newsletter.
> The site does not represent the opinion of the Community and the
> Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of data
> appearing herein.
> 
> Reproduction of the newsletter is authorised, except for commercial
> purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.
> 
> Some of the documents and multimedia sequences in this newsletter and on
> the COVAX website might contain references, or pointers, to information
> maintained by other organisations. Please note that we do not control
> and cannot guarantee the relevance, timeliness or accuracy of these
> outside materials.
> --
> Robin Yeates
> Assistant Director: Research & Development
> LASER
> The Development & Networking Agency
> 4th Floor, Gun Court
> 70 Wapping Lane
> London E1W 2RS
> United Kingdom
> Tel: +44 (020) 7702 2020
> Fax: +44 (020) 7702 2019
> email: [log in to unmask]
> URL: http://www.viscount.org.uk/
> 
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----------------------
Ann Lees, 
Project Officer (Library Services)
c/o King's College London, The Strand,
London WC2R 2LS
tel: 020 7848 2986 
fax: 020 7848 1777