Output schemas of XSLT stylesheets and their applications

The capabilities of XSLT processing are widely used to transform XML documents into target XML documents. These target XML documents conform to output schemas of the used XSLT stylesheet. Output schemas of XSLT stylesheets can be used for a static analysis of the used XSLT stylesheet, to automatically detect the XSLT stylesheet of target XML documents or to reason on the output schema without access to the target XML documents. In this paper, we develop an approach to automatically determining the output schema of an XSLT stylesheet. We also describe several application scenarios of output schemas. The experimental evaluation shows that our prototype can determine the output schemas of nearly all typical XSLT stylesheets and the improvements in preciseness in several application scenarios when using output schemas in comparison to when not using output schemas.     

Equivalences and optimizations in an expressive XSLT subset

XML is the standard data interchange format and XSLT is the W3C proposed standard for transforming and restructuring XML documents. It turns out that XSLT has very powerful query capabilities as well. Hovewer, due to its complex syntax and lack of formal specification, it is not a trivial task to decide whether two XSLT stylesheets yield the same result, even if for an XSLT subset. We isolate such fragment, powerful enough for expressing several interesting queries and for manipulating XML documents and show how to translate them into queries expressed in a properly extended version of TAX, a powerful XML query algebra, for which we provide a collection of equivalence rules. It is then possible to reason about XSLT equivalences, by translating XSLT stylesheets into XTAX expressions and then statically verifying their equivalence, by means of the mentioned equivalence rules.     

XML graphs in program analysis

XML graphs have shown to be a simple and effective formalism for representing sets of XML documents in program analysis. It has evolved through a six year period with variants tailored for a range of applications. We present a unified definition, outline the key properties including validation of XML graphs against different XML schema languages, and provide a software package that enables others to make use of these ideas. We also survey the use of XML graphs for program analysis with four very different languages: Xact (XML in Java), Java Servlets (Web application programming), XSugar (transformations between XML and non-XML data), and XSLT (stylesheets for transforming XML documents).     

Formsheets and the XML forms language

This paper presents XForm — a proposal for a general and powerful mechanism for handling forms in XML. XForm defines form — related constructs independent of any particular XML language and set of form controls. It defines the notion of formsheets as a mechanism for computing form values on the client, form values being arbitrary, typed XML documents. This enables a symmetrical exchange of data between clients and servers which is useful for example for database and workflow applications. Formsheets can be written in a variety of languages — we argue that the document transformation capabilities of XSL stylesheets make them an elegant choice.     

Universal fuzzy system representation with XML

An XML schema and an XML DTD (Document Type Definition) are designed as syntax to represent general fuzzy systems in XML. We demonstrate how fuzzy systems described in XML with our proposed schema can be universally compatible with different software by using appropriate XSLT (eXtensible Style Language Transformation) stylesheets. The proposed schema offers a standard platform for fuzzy system developers and users to collaborate without compatibility issues. We demonstrate how a fuzzy logic design coded in accordance with our XML schema can subsequently be understood and integrated with two different software like MATLAB and FuzzyJess.     

A Hierarchical Extraction Policy for content extraction signatures

Content extraction signatures (CES) enable the selective disclosure of verifiable content from signed documents. We have previously demonstrated a CES Extraction Policy for fragment grouping to allow the document signer to designate which subsets of the original document are valid subdocuments. Extending this ability, we introduce a new Hierarchical Grouping Extraction Policy that is more powerful, and for which the encoding is dramatically smaller, than the existing Grouping Extraction Policy. This new Extraction Policy maps naturally onto the hierarchically structured documents commonly found in digital libraries. After giving a motivating example involving digital libraries we then conjecture as to how to enrich their functionality through the use of CESs. We also show how to implement the new extraction policy using XML signatures with a custom transform along with an improved design for the XML signature structure in order to achieve CES functionality.     

Compiler support for effective XSL transformation

XML is a markup language used to describe data or documents. The main goal of XML is to facilitate the sharing of data across diverse information systems, especially via the Internet. XML Stylesheet Transformations (XSLT) is a standard approach to describing how to transform an XML document into another data format. The ever‐increasing number of Web technologies being used in our everyday lives commonly employs XSLT to support data exchange among heterogeneous environments, and the associated increasing burdens on XSLT processors have increased the demand for high‐performance XSLT processors. In this paper, we present an XSLT compiler, named Zebu, which can transform an XSLT stylesheet into the corresponding C program. The compiled program can be used to transform documents without the processing of XSLT stylesheets. The results of experimental testing using standard benchmarks show that the proposed XSLT compiler performs well in processing XML transformations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Electronic lexicography

This paper offers a brief survey of some important developments in the use of computers in making dictionaries and lexicons. Making a dictionary involves collecting the data, sorting and lemmatizing, editing and printing. Five major types of machine-readable dictionaries have developed from these procedures: Machine Readable Lexicons of individual authors, Machine Readable Dictionaries with codes for linguistic information, Machine Dictionaries with selected information, and Lexical Databases with lexical information abstracted from machine-readable dictionaries. The second edition of the QED is a machine-readable dictionary with codes that may provide the basis for a diachronic lexical database. Harry M. Logan, associate professor of English, has written The Dialect of the Middle English Life of St. Katherine (Mouton, 1973), using the computer in a study of medieval dialectology. He has also written articles on computational stylistics and literary analysis in CHum, Language. and Style, College Literature, and on the dictionary in Dictionaries.     

一种基于内容模型图的XML Schema Definition的提取方法

使用XML Schema能够对XML文档进行有效性验证以及对查询、转换等操作进行优化,但是实际应用中大量XML文档缺失关联的Schema.提出了一种根据XML文档自动提取对应的XML Schema Definition(XSD)的方法XSDInfer,先根据合并规则将XML解析过程中分析得到的模式信息记录在内容模型图中,再根据生成规则将其转化为内容模型表达式,进而得到XSD.XSDInfer能够在内存消耗比较少的情况下快速地处理超大规模、深度嵌套的XML文档,同时支持XSD的上下文相关的内容模型,提取出的XSD也具有更好的可读性.实验表明,与同类方法相比,XSDInfer具有更好的可扩展性和表达能力.     

Information sharing across multiple humanitarian organizations—a web-based information exchange platform for project reporting

This article analyzes information sharing problems in the humanitarian development sector and proposes the concept of a web-based exchange platform to face some of the technical challenges. The “Development Information Exchange System” is a mediator-wrapper-architecture that uses XML documents to loosely couple autonomous and heterogeneous information systems. Detailed project information of humanitarian organizations that resides on data provider systems can be formatted with XSL stylesheets according to the needs of the users and shared within or between organizations. The system can help to close the control loop by providing qualitative information about humanitarian projects. This makes project management more efficient. The proposed architecture solves an interface problem between the various partners and stakeholders of humanitarian projects. It is a first step towards a service-oriented architecture between humanitarian organizations. The next step could be the definition of cross-organizational business processes. These processes may be defined platform-independently with the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services. A prototype of the exchange platform is presented and evaluated in this article.     

The well-designed young mathematician

This paper complements McCarthy's “The well designed child”, in part by putting it in a broader context, a space of sets of requirements and a space of designs, and in part by relating design features to development of mathematical competences. I moved into AI hoping to understand myself, especially hoping to understand how I could do mathematics. Over the ensuing four decades, my interactions with AI and other disciplines led to: design-based, cross-disciplinary investigations of requirements, especial those arising from interactions with a complex environment; a draft partial ontology for describing spaces of possible architectures, especially virtual machine architectures; investigations of how different forms of representation relate to different functions; analysis of biological nature/nurture tradeoffs and their relevance to machines; studies of control issues in a complex architecture; and showing how what can occur in such an architecture relates to our intuitive concepts of motivation, feeling, preferences, emotions, attitudes, values, moods, consciousness, etc. I conjecture that working models of human vision can lead to models of spatial reasoning that would help to support Kant's view of mathematics by showing that human mathematical abilities are a natural extension of abilities produced by biological evolution that are not yet properly understood, and have barely been noticed by psychologists and neuroscientists. Some requirements for such models, are described, including aspects of our ability to interact with complex 3-D structures and processes that extend Gibson's ideas concerning action affordances, to include proto-affordances, epistemic affordances and deliberative affordances. Some of what a child learns about structures and processes starts as empirical then, as a result of reflective processes, can be recognised as necessary (e.g., mathematical) truths. These processes normally develop unnoticed in young children, but provide the basis for much creativity in behaviour, as well as leading, in some, to development of an interest in mathematics. We still need to understand what sort of self-monitoring and self-extending architecture, and what forms of representation, are required to make this possible. This paper does not presuppose that all mathematical learners can do logic, though some fairly general form of reasoning seems to be required.     

Optimizing the execution of XSLT stylesheets for querying transformed XML data

We have to deal with different data formats whenever data formats evolve or data must be integrated from heterogeneous systems. These data when implemented in XML for data exchange cannot be shared freely among applications without data transformation. A common approach to solve this problem is to convert the entire XML data from their source format to the applications’ target formats using the transformations rules specified in XSLT stylesheets. However, in many cases, not all XML data are required to be transformed except for a smaller part described by a user’s query (application). In this paper, we present an approach that optimizes the execution time of an XSLT stylesheet for answering a given XPath query by modifying the XSLT stylesheet in such a way that it would (a) capture only the parts in the XML data that are relevant to the query and (b) process only those XSLT instructions that are relevant to the query. We prove the correctness of our optimization approach, analyze its complexity and present experimental results. The experimental results show that our approach performs the best in terms of execution time, especially when many cost-intensive XSLT instructions can be excluded in the XSLT stylesheet.     

Productive use of failure in inductive proof

Proof by mathematical induction gives rise to various kinds of eureka steps, e.g., missing lemmata and generalization. Most inductive theorem provers rely upon user intervention in supplying the required eureka steps. In contrast, we present a novel theorem-proving architecture for supporting the automatic discovery of eureka steps. We build upon rippling, a search control heuristic designed for inductive reasoning. We show how the failure if rippling can be used in bridging gaps in the search for inductive proofs. The research reported in this paper was supported by EPSRC grant GR/J/80702 and ARC grant 438.     

Matching swimmers to events in a championship swimming meet

This paper presents a zero-one mathematical programming model for determining which swimmers to assign to different events in a championship swimming meet. Since the model includes nonlinear constraints, it is demonstrated how some ad hoc linear constraints may be created as surrogates for the nonlinear constraints so that a zero-one linear programming code may be used to solve the problem.     

Schema-based Web wrapping

An effective solution to automate information extraction from Web pages is represented by wrappers. A wrapper associates a Web page with an XML document that represents part of the information in that page in a machine-readable format. Most existing wrapping approaches have traditionally focused on how to generate extraction rules, while they have ignored potential benefits deriving from the use of the schema of the information being extracted in the wrapper evaluation. In this paper, we investigate how the schema of extracted information can be effectively used in both the design and evaluation of a Web wrapper. We define a clean declarative semantics for schema-based wrappers by introducing the notion of (preferred) extraction model, which is essential to compute a valid XML document containing the information extracted from a Web page. We developed the SCRAP (SChema-based wRAPper for web data) system for the proposed schema-based wrapping approach, which also provides visual support tools to the wrapper designer. Moreover, we present a wrapper generalization framework to profitably speed up the design of schema-based wrappers. Experimental evaluation has shown that SCRAP wrappers are not only able to successfully extract the required data, but also they are robust to changes that may occur in the source Web pages.     

A Novel Context-based Technique for Web Information Retrieval

In this paper we present context matching, a novel context-based technique for the ad-hoc retrieval of web documents. The aim of the technique is to dynamically generate a measure of document term significance during retrieval that can be used as a substitute or co-contributor of the term frequency measure. Unlike term frequency, which relies on a term occurring multiple times in a document to be considered significant, context matching is based on the notion that if a term in a given document occurs in that document in the context of the query, then that term is deemed to be significant. Context matching has the ability to potentially determine a term to be significant even if it occurs only once in a document. Vice versa, it also has the ability to determine a term to be insignificant, even if occurs frequently within a document. We show how expanded terms generated by a typical query expansion technique can be used effectively as query context for context matching. The technique is ideally suited to the nature of web information retrieval and we show how context matching significantly improves retrieval accuracy through experimental results on TREC web benchmark data.     

Quantitative analysis of mathematical documents

Mathematical documents are analyzed from several viewpoints for the development of practical OCR for mathematical and other scientific documents. Specifically, four viewpoints are quantified using a large-scale database of mathematical documents, containing 690,000 manually ground-truthed characters: (i) the number of character categories, (ii) abnormal characters (e.g., touching characters), (iii) character size variation, and (iv) the complexity of the mathematical expressions. The result of these analyses clarifies the difficulties of recognizing mathematical documents and then suggests several promising directions to overcome them. Received: 3 March 2004, Accepted: 5 January 2005, Published online: 29 June 2005 Correspondence to: S. Uchida     

CDN内容分发策略数学建模研究

内容分发策略是影响一个内容分发网络(CDN)性能的主要原因之一。然而最早使用的各种启发式算法已经不能满足用户对时延的要求,因此许多研究人员开始利用数学规划的手段解决这一难题。但是,目前所提出的数学模型都存在其局限性和不足之处。本文从各个实际角度出发,考虑了流媒体速率、文件维持消耗、网络拓扑等各种情况,并对各种情况建立了完善的数学模型。同时,本文还利用节点来表示一个区域内的多个服务器,从而降低变量空间。