[kde-edu]: Fwd: Re: forward message

[Carsten Niehaus]

On Tuesday 13 September 2005 02:08, Shelagh Manton wrote:
> One question, I was thinking that the printing part might have to be
> through latex/tex, which I have used, but would xml also do the same
> job? I am not at all familiar with xml except of an awareness that it
> has become very important for document formatting and database stuff.
> Could you direct me to a good tutorial so I can begin to understand it?

To xml? xml is just an format which looks like this:

<foo>
  <bar>text</bar>
  <buff someattr="bing" >another text</bar>
</foo>

The good thing about this is that you can describe *what* bar, buff and foo 
*stand for* so that a parser can make use of it. Semantics is what you really 
want. 
Have a look at the "Personendaten" in the wikipedia, pelase. The following 
stuff is from the german article about Albert Einstein 
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein)

{{Personendaten|
 NAME=Einstein, Albert
|ALTERNATIVNAMEN=
|KURZBESCHREIBUNG=[[Physiker]]
|GEBURTSDATUM=[[14. März]] [[1879]]
|GEBURTSORT=[[Ulm]]
|STERBEDATUM=[[18. April]] [[1955]]
|STERBEORT=[[Princeton (New Jersey)|Princeton]], [[USA]]
}}

NAME = Name
ALTERNATIVNAMEN = For example, "Puff Daddy" for Sean Combs
KURZBESCHREIBUNG = Short description
GEBURTSDATUM = date of birth
GEBURTSORT = place of birth
STERBEDATUM = date of death
STERBEORT = place of death

These information are in all german persona-article and are used for several 
things. You will *not* see them in the article as they are metadata. But this 
is what you have in mind, I bet ;-)

For the wikipedia, they plan a so called semantic web. This mean, you add 
information to a link. Like this:

"I love [[Capital of [[France]]|Paris]]."

With this information the WP knows that Paris is the capital of france. 
"Capital of $" is a defined entity. Others are "Parent of $". "Place in $". 
"Politician of $", "Populationsize of $" and others. 
With these information you can for example query like this:

Give me the 10 biggest towns in the province of Coloumbia in Canada.

This is possible because every town in Coloumbia will have both 
"Populationsize" and "Place in Coloumbia" as semantic entities. So the 
parsers know *what* a link stands for and can make use of it.

Carsten
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