At 6/13/2006 08:00 AM, Thomas Muhr wrote:
>One important aspect regarding long termed
>longitudinal studies is "standards". There are
>several threats associated with using tools over
>a longer period of time. One is, that the
>original tool is simply not available anymore
>for what reasons ever (which will never happen
>to us, of course!-). Or you might wish to
>analyze your data with different tools at some
>stage of research. For both circumstances an
>approved standard for the project data might
>become important. ATLAS.ti supports such standards.
Thomas,
Well! QDA Miner v2.0 also, and until Atlas-ti 6.0
is released next year, I would say that QDA Miner
is the only major QDA software that can be used
to export tagged documents to XML. But the point
I would like to make is something completely
different. While I agree that supporting XML is
something useful, I would like to express some
reservations about the true value of XML. I would
not say that XML is a standard, it is more a
structured language in which standards could be
developed and are being developed. Actually,
there are currently hundreds of standards
developed in XML for various purposes, such as
for the storage of taxonomies, thesaurus,
linguistic coding, as well as for numerous
industries. The first XML standard we chose to
support in QDA Miner was Triple-S, an XML
standard to exchange survey data. When we started
to look at standards for hierarchical taxonomies,
we found 3 XML standards, none of those was widely used.
This leads me to identify a few problems with
XML. First, importing data in XML can be quite
problematic since, unless we follow more specific
standards when choosing the name of elements,
mapping the structure of an existing XML file to
an application will be very difficult. On can
still use some XML editors but they are not the
kind of tools that can be learned quickly. While
for HTML, we know pretty much which application
has to be supported (i.e. the browsers) there is
no such tools in XML (except maybe the syntax
checking tools that can only be used to make sure
you followed the XML language conventions).
Another major problem with XML when applied to
QDA is that it currently does not provide
conventions for overlapping markups, something
that is quite common in QDA. XML is a highly
structured version of SGML where elements must be
structured hiearchically (they say "well-formed")
so that tag contents should never overlap. But
sometimes you need them to overlap and there has
been many proposals for solving this issue (the
Text Encoding Initiative and the OSIS group
proposed the use of two different kinds of
milestones, and some suggested using other
existing SGML or XML features, or adding new
ones). I don't know which strategy Atlas-ti 6
will use for exporting tags in documents, but we
decided to use a method somewhat similar to the
one propose by the OSIS group. Although we
follow the XML rules, by doing this, most XML
editing tool available today won't be able to
correctly interpret the significance of those
special "milestones". If you choose another
solution, then people may never be able to
exchange coded documents between QDA Miner,
Atlas-ti and maybe even between any other
software supporting XML. If you choose a similar
solution than the one we chosen, then the only
software that will be able to use those markups
produced by Atlas-ti will be our software (and vice versa).
This brings me to a last problem with XML. Since
overlapping codes are not allowed or not easily
implemented in XML, then any text formatting has
to be dropped from the document. You cannot use
<b> </b> to put things in bold or <i> </i> to
make this text italic. You may be able to do
this, but you would have to make sure those codes
never ovelaps. HTML can do this, simple because
it breaks the "well-formeness" rule of XML. (This
is also the reason why XHTML may also be
problematic since they are proposing it to
eliminate overlapping codes in HTML 4).
I would say that in order for XML to be really
useful for qualitative researchers, then we would
have to sit, you and me, and all those interested
in this idea of allowing easy exchange of data
between QDA tools, transcription tools, etc, and
develop our own standards for the QDA community.
We may also decide which other standards should
ideally be supported. Should we follow the Text
Coding Initiative group (and wait for them to
solve the markup overlap problem) or the OSIS
group (the Bible Technolgies Group) which has
also proposed some solutions for this? Should we
develop our own standards and our own solution
and make sure those standards fulfill our need?
Until we have our own standards, I would say that
the easiest way to exchange tagged documents
would be to use either plain text (or unicode
text), HTML, and maybe even RTF. XML has the
potential of contributing to the development of
standards for the QDA community, but we are just not there yet.
Best regards,
Normand Péladeau
Provalis Research
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