Dealing with structural patterns of XML documents

Abstract

Evaluating collections of XML documents without paying attention to the schema they were written in may give interesting insights into the expected characteristics of a markup language, as well as any regularity that may span vocabularies and languages, and that are more fundamental and frequent than plain content models. In this paper we explore the idea of structural patterns in XML vocabularies, by examining the characteristics of elements as they are used, rather than as they are defined. We introduce from the ground up a formal theory of 8 plus 3 structural patterns for XML elements, and verify their identifiability in a number of different XML vocabularies. The results allowed the creation of visualization and content extraction tools that are completely independent of the schema and without any previous knowledge of the semantics and organization of the XML vocabulary of the documents.

Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles

“…In order to fill that gap, in the last decade we have experimented with the use of a theory of structural patterns for markup documents (Di Iorio et al, 2014), that has since been applied in several national and international standards, among which OASIS LegalDocumentML (https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/legaldocml/) 3 , a legal document standard for the specification of parliamentary, legislative and judicial documents, and for their interchange between institutions in different countries.…”

“…The development of RASH started from the whole HTML5 grammar, and proceeded by removing and restricting the particular use of HTML elements, to make them expressive enough for representing the structures of scholarly papers and to have the language totally compliant with the theory on structural patterns for XML documents (Di Iorio et al, 2014) introduced in 'Theoretical foundations: structural patterns'.…”

“…A different discourse can be done for the pattern popup, which is meant to represent complex substructures that interrupt but do not break the main flow of the text, such as footnotes (Di Iorio et al, 2014). An element compliant to the popup pattern, while still not allowing directly text content inside itself, is found in elements with a mixed context [t+s+].…”

The Document Components Ontology (DoCO)

“…The creation of DoCO was undertaken by studying different corpora of documents (mainly scientific literature and web documents on different topics) and publishers' guidelines, from two perspectives -the structural and the rhetorical -as was also done by past works on document patterns [13][14][15]. We also undertook some informal interviews with researchers in different fields and with academic publishers, in order to gather as much information as possible about document components and their use.…”

“…DoCO imports the Pattern Ontology that describes structural patterns [14], and the Discourse Element Ontology (DEO) 26 , which was developed with DoCO and describes rhetorical components. Additionally, it also defines hybrid classes describing elements that are both structural and rhetorical in nature, such as paragraph, section or list.…”