POSC-Caesar FIATECH IDS-ADI Projects

Intelligent Data Sets Accelerating Deployment of ISO15926

Realizing Open Information Interoperability


IDS-ADI QXF Project

QXF (for want of a better acronym) stands for Quick XML Format (for ISO15926).

ISO 15926 Payload

The main point of QXF is to provide a rich and explicit means of delivering ISO 15926 payload. It provides a layer between more purpose-driven XML formats for ISO 15926 data, and OWL/RDF. QXF includes a number of these upper layers as well to make this process easier.

Maintain Explicitness One Simple Step from OWL/RDF

QXF is structured in such a way that it transforms into OWL/RDF with a very simple, streaming XSL algorithm - allowing developers to use XSL and other conventional XML tools, without losing explicitness or the link to OWL/RDF.

Upper Layers for Even Greater Simplicity

As a project, it also includes a number of other initiatives: simpler, more human-centric view without losing explicitness and with gaining some XML validation of the structure; and a means of representing complex literals such as lists and tables of floating point values.

Relationship Between Layers

Main Reference Page

The main reference page provides the actual definitions and DTDs, while below we have some quick explanations and (soon) some discussion.

Base QXF

The base QXF structure itself is trivial - it allows representation of n-ary relationships with URIs used to defined resources defined in SPARQL endpoints using OWL/RDF. It is not intended to communicate much to a human, merely to allow early binding implementations to express template data.

Importantly, base QXF supports early binding models placing all of the structural information in the references, much like OWL/RDF.

The Literal DTD

The "literal" DTD provides a means of representing complex literal objects such as 3D points and coefficient tables. Its purpose is to insulate the casual XML user from the singly-linked list implementation of OWL/RDF, which are close to unreadable for humans, but great for machines.

The publish XSL that converts QXF into OWL/RDF also converts this literal format into OWL/RDF, so the literal format is good to use at any level of QXF.

Importantly, literal also supports early binding models.

QTXF

QTXF takes QXF a step further towards a more human-centric XML representation. It does this by "hiding" the explicit URIs in DTDs and using XML element names to reference template definitions and their role names.

QTXF doesn't support early binding models - in an early binding model, data would have to be restricted to a known set of templates. There is ongoing work to define a common set of templates to achieve this.

Template Definition Language

There is also room here for a template definition language that can be transformed to QXF and then to OWL/RDF in much the same way as QTXF.

If the transform can be supported purely with XSL, then it could be a candidate for automated support in the RDS/WIP 2.0 and for manual support in 1.0.


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