Thursday April 17th

Introduction to XSLT & its use in Grainger Library full-text & metadata projects

Speakers: Tim Cole, Tom Habing, Bill Mischo, University Library.

This presentation will introduce XSL Transformations (XSLT), a stylesheet language for transforming XML documents, and XPath, a related expression language integral to XSLT, and will talk about some of the ways these technologies can be used in a digital library context when working with full-text and metadata expressed in XML. XSLT and XPath are recommendations maintained by the W3 Consortium.

The presenters will provide a brief overview and tutorial of basic XSLT and XPath syntax and semantics and will provide simple illustrations of how these technologies work. Two examples showing more advanced uses of XSLT also will be presented:

• The use of XSLT to transform and present chapters and subsections from an XML version (incomplete) of the 21-volume (in print format) ASM [Metals] Handbook http://www.asminternational.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Bookstore/ASM_Handbooks/ASM_Handbooks.htm.
• The use of XSLT to automatically transform qualified Dublin Core metadata to simple Dublin Core according to the way relationships between the two schemas are described in the qualified Dublin Core XML Schema Definition (XSD) recently posted to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Website http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/qdc/2003/04/02/notes/.

Pointers to more in depth tutorials and treatments of XSLT will be provided for those interested in following-up after the session.