Re: XML and VisAD.

• To: "Armin S. A. Roehrl" <Armin.Roehrl@xxxxxxx>
• Subject: Re: XML and VisAD.
• From: Bill Hibbard <hibbard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 05:35:35 -0600

Hi Armin,

>         did anybody by accident think of extending the SpreadSheet with XML
> data-read in capability?
> For standalone applications, it wouldn't be hard to use IBM's or Sun's
> XML
> parser .. but I was wondering if anybody has done anything in that
> direction
> so far.

We are interested in XML and have been including it in our
recent VisAD proposals.

No one I know of is currently working on an XML adapter for
VisAD, but it would be a good thing.  Ideally it would be an
extension of visad.data.Form and reside in the visad.data.xml
package.  It would require some decisions about how XML fields
get mapped to the VisAD data model.  Certainly a table full of
records with named fields could be mapped to a FunctionType
like:

  (index -> (field1, field2, ..., fieldN))

where 'index' is just an ordinal record number in the table,
and the fields may be either numerical or text.  You could
also do nested tables as nested FunctionTypes.

I don't know enough about XML to know if it defines standard
fields for units, coordinate systems, topologies, missing
values, etc.

Another approach would be to define an XML DTD for a persistent
representation of VisAD data objects.

If you or anyone wants to do any of this, we will be supportive
and also interested in helping to make your work available to
the VisAD community, by web links or inclusion of source with
our distribution.

Cheers,
Bill
----------------------------------------------------------
Bill Hibbard, SSEC, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI  53706
hibbard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  608-263-4427  fax: 608-263-6738
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/vis.html

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    • From: Armin S. A. Roehrl

• References:
  • XML and Visad.
    • From: Armin S. A. Roehrl