[DFDL-WG] Publication and notation of DFDL

[Jakob Voss]

Hi,

I stumbled upon DFDL searching about data archaeology - very interesting
and relevant work! Is it already applied in practise for information
preservation in libraries and archives? Unfortunately DFDL is not
documented very well, compared to standards of W3C and similar
institutions. Do you plan to set up a website with a more readable
description of DFDL like other popular standards? json.org is one of the
good examples because it describes the JSON standard easy to understand
and with links to implementations.



My second question is about the notation of DFDL. Has anyone tried to
create a notation that is not based on XML? For instance Notation 3 is
much more readable than RDF/XML and Backus-Naur-Form is more readable
than a grammar formally defined in mathematical formulas. Especially if
you describe non-XML formats it is a barrier to set up the whole XML
framework stack in oder to use DFDL.


I think that DFDL has strong potential but in the current form (both the
way it is documented and its notation) it does not encourage potential
users to adopt it.


Cheers
Jakob Voss


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