Professional XML Meta Data Book

For any developer or designer creating XML and searchable Web documents, Professional XML Meta Data covers the essential XML-based standards and concepts that will facilitate the emerging "semantic Web" of the near future. Mixing the practical side of existing standards with a bit of prognostication of this evolving technology, this ambitious book casts a wide net to highlight some standards that may very well play a role in the evolution of the Internet. Now that XML has gone mainstream with systems such as the UK Government Interoperability Framework (a system mentioned early here), standards for creating searchable content are fast becoming important. This book shows you how, with a mix of technologies that are here right now, and some technologies that are farther down the road. A good practical reason to buy this text is to get a working knowledge of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a standard used today to label and search content from disparate vendors. After a quick review of basic XML standards including XML Schemas, Xpath, and XPointer for getting around the XML-powered Internet, this volume digs in with a worthwhile tutorial to basic RDF, including the so-called Dublin Core (from Ohio, not Ireland, a standard for tagging documents with basics such as creator, title, subject and date), plus using the SAX API to parse RDF. This text then ranges farther a field into the ideas and evolving standards that will help usher in the "semantic Web," starting with XML based topic maps, which can help categorise XML content. More ambitious efforts such as Meaning Definition Language (MDL) are surely more speculative and theoretical, but it's a strength of this book that it takes on some leading-edge academic standards and tools to point the way forward. (As the authors themselves note, not all of the technologies covered here are likely to be around in five years' time, but some undoubtedly will.) Intriguing topics on automatically generating topic maps and using Schematron for data mining offer a glimpse into the future. Though at times densely packed with XML terminology, Professional XML Meta Data outlines some leading edge tools and techniques that will surely affect the future Web. It's a challenging resource, perfect for the early adopters of the "semantic Web" who will need to contend with these new XML standards and tools for searching and categorizing XML-based data. --Richard DraganRead More