Re: ESIS, Groves and XML

[Daniel Mahler <dmahler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Brandon Ibach wrote:
> 
> Quoting Daniel Mahler <dmahler@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> > This sounds roughly compatible with XML's DOM (or SAX?).
> > Would an ESIS/(DOM|SAX) interface be a natural way
> > integrate SGML tools with XML tools?
> >
>    Whoa... ESIS is *not* an interface spec like DOM or SAX.  Those
> standards specify *how* the data is passed from one component to
> another (such as a parser to a processing application).  ESIS
> specifies *what* is passed.
>    It's kind of like constructing a table of contents for a book.  Do
> you just list the page that each chapter starts on, go down to the
> level of sections within each chapter, or go so far as to have a
> single line to describe each paragraph?  You have to choose how much
> detail to include.  ESIS is a prescribed level of detail for how much
> information to pass from the parsing process to whatever application
> is receiving the parsed information.
>    The standard SGML Grove Plan modules that a DSSSL spec is supposed
> to include by default (baseabs, prlgabs0 and instabs) correspond
> (approximately) to ESIS.

I have not had a chance to read the specs on all this.
Going by what read here on the list,
this how I understand things so far.

1 A grove is a lableled directed graph.
  There a specified subgraph, which is a tree.
  This is the parse tree of the document.
  Remaining arcs are put in by subsequent processing.

2 The arcs are called attributes.
  However, there are also attributes which are not arcs,
  that specify scalar values for a node.
  This is vaguely similar to entity-relation modelling

3 A property set specifies a set node and attribute kinds that go with
them.
  Basically this is a schema for labelled graphs.
  It plays the role of an ER model.
  (It can be thought of as a DTD for a class of graphs.
   Although a single property set specifies the class of groves for many
DTDs)

4 There is a property set, the SGML property set, to which all groves
  of SGML documents conform, regardless of the documents DTD.
  One can specify property sets for groves that are not derved from SGML
documents.
  (There are extremely few of these. :) )

5 A grove plan is a subset of a given property set
  (ie it specifies a subset of node and attribute kinds)
  Given a grove conforming to the property set,
  the grove plan specifies a subgraph, or 'view', of the grove
consisting
  only of the nodes and attributes of kinds included in the grove plan.

6 ESIS is (or correponds to?) a grove plan,
  which retains approximately as much information
  as is available through DOM or SAX

7 An ESIS stream is a machine oriented data format for serialising the
ESIS view
  of a grove. I am not sure if this is a part of the spec or something
Jade/SP specific.




> -Brandon :)
> 
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