Subject: Re: XML and GILS
Douglas Nebert (ddnebert@fgdclearhs.er.usgs.gov)
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 16:32:10 -0500
Message-Id: <351AC95A.B483179A@fgdclearhs.er.usgs.gov> Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 16:32:10 -0500 From: Douglas Nebert <ddnebert@fgdclearhs.er.usgs.gov> To: gils@cni.org Subject: Re: XML and GILS References: <s51a7e9b.061@USGS.GOV>
On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Mark Kelly <mark@markkelly.com> wrote:
>
> Eliot (and anyone else),
>
> I'm out in Seattle at an XML conference. Microsoft, Netscape and Sun
> have all said that the se XML as the way to handle structured data on
> the Web.
>
> A new W3C submission <see
> http://www.microsoft.com/standards/xml/xmldata-f.htm> called XML-Data is
> being proposed as way of getting any information from any data source to
> any client - browsers, applications or applets.
There are a suite of companion standards and drafts that will make XML a
really workable means to move structured information across the Net. I
have created a little XML reference page for my own use that may be of
interest. XML is touted as working well within or beside the Resource
Description Framework (RDF) that we should watch.
The geospatial data community, through the FGDC or "GEO" profile that
inherits GILS elements already, has been representing metadata for
transfer as SGML for a couple of years. By changing the declaration
line our metadata entries are now XML compatible and we have had a
reference DTD online. The mapping or negotiation between XML for GILS
and GEO entries will be an interesting and necessary exercise, and one I
hope will also be facilitated through software. To assure some semantic
crosswalk we probably ought to use the same XML tags, though we could
with greater difficulty provide external mapping. I don't know the
answer to this one, and I don't think the community has figured it our
yet either.
The support for collecting, navigating, searching for, and presenting XML
will be of great benefit to extending our reach with metadata, allowing
focus on data management and less on all the "special-case" software we
have had to develop.
XML Resource Page: http://130.11.52.184/xmlinfo.html
Doug Nebert
Federal Geographic Data Committee
<ddnebert@fgdclearhs.er.usgs.gov>
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