[DFDL-WG] Publication and notation of DFDL

[Steve Hanson]

Hello Jakob

Thank you for your comments.

Although it has been under development for several years, the 
specification DFDL is only now nearing completion. Two implementations are 
in progress but neither is (yet) publicly available.  Now that the spec is 
complete, we are working on a DFDL primer which will make the language 
more accessible. A dedicated set of web pages within the OGF site is a 
good idea and is something we will look into for the future.

One of the goals of DFDL is to leverage existing XML technologies in order 
to make interoperability with XML very easy. Hence the use of XML Schema 
subset and XPath subset. This was considered to outweigh the any 
disadvantages caused by lack of XML experience by DFDL authors.

Regards

Steve Hanson
Strategy, Common Transformation & DFDL
Co-Chair, OGF DFDL WG
IBM SWG, Hursley, UK,
smh at uk.ibm.com,
tel +44-(0)1962-815848



From:
"Jakob Voss" <Jakob.Voss at gbv.de>
To:
<dfdl-wg at ogf.org>
Date:
31/08/2010 18:56
Subject:
[DFDL-WG] Publication and notation of DFDL
Sent by:
dfdl-wg-bounces at ogf.org



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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