[DFDL-WG] Publication and notation of DFDL

Wed Sep 1 10:54:07 CDT 2010

Jakob,

I’ll just add that curation and preservation are definitely a driver – my
participation, and that of my colleagues at NCSA, in the DFDL
specification effort over the years  been funded by the US DOE and now the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with preservation of
scientific data as a key use case. In addition to participating in the
spec effort at highly varying levels over the years and working on DFDL
parsers (an older non-standard parser (Defuddle) and one of the two Steve
mentions that is not yet out), we’ve been doing some work to plug it in as
an iRODS microservice as part of a collaboration with SHAMAN. (Mostly
demonstration/prototype use  versus any real deployment at this point.)
Our NARA project has also been thinking about how to extend the idea of
DFDL to and RDF-level logical model, though the only implementation we
currently have for that is to do Defuddle to an pre-DFDL XML model
followed by a GRDDL step to get to RDF.

It’s very exciting to see the DFDL spec being finalized. There’s been a
tremendous amount of effort from the people on this list to make it happen
(kudos to those who have brought it to final form!) and, as Steve says,
hopefully that energy can now turn towards documentation and building
momentum in various communities. I’m hoping it will take off in NSF’s
DataNet program for example and would like to encourage other
curation/preservation efforts to participate in the specification process
and to coordinate in building DFDL format descriptor libraries,
contributing to open source DFDL parsers, etc.

Cheers,

 Jim

James D. Myers, PhD

Associate Director, Cyberenvironments

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

University of Illinois @ Urbana Champaign

217-244-1934

jimmyers at ncsa.uiuc.edu

From: dfdl-wg-bounces at ogf.org [mailto:dfdl-wg-bounces at ogf.org] On Behalf
Of Steve Hanson
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2010 3:09 AM
To: Jakob Voss
Cc: dfdl-wg at ogf.org
Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Publication and notation of DFDL

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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