ANNOUNCE: Virtual Hyperglossary (VHG) DTD 1.0 alpha

[Peter Murray-Rust]

The VHG (Virtual Hyperglossary) is a simple but powerful approach for
supporting semantics and terminology using XML technology. The first
publicly available DTD (with documentation and examples) is at:
http://www.vhg.org.uk
and
http://www.vhg.org.uk/dtd

Terminology (glossaries, dictionaries, etc.) are an essential part of
providing semantic information ("what does FOO mean?"). The VHG is aimed at
providing this in a distributed WWW context as has been developed so that
non-experts in terminology can construct their own glossaries. Because
these use XML syntax they can interoperate with any XML document and can
therefore be used as a simple but powerful way of adding semantics. The VHG
approach is deliberately simple so that glossaries can be developed and
maintained without special tools. 

The VHG is built from existing or emerging standards, at present:
	- XML1.0 for syntax
	- XLink (XML-LINK) for providing structure (e.g to support multilinguality)
	- ISO FDIS 12620 for terminological data categories

The VHG is a philosophy as well as a technology and encourages
organisations to develop their terminology for use in a global distributed
context. We are already partnering with providers of high-quality content
such as learned societies and governmental organisations. 

We would be very grateful for feedback, especially on the proposed use of
XLink for adding structure and, of course any bugs.  We have validated the
example VHG with DXP and displayed it with JUMBO2. An add-on module
(JUMBO-VHG) is under development (to determine entailment, perform Virtual
Hypermarkup, etc.)

We thank Sue Ellen Wright (Kent State University) and other terminological
friends for much help during the development of the VHG

	Lesley West and Peter Murray-Rust

BTW. In creating the documentation for the DTD I have had tried to create a
'literate' approach - fairly horrendous using HTML. AS soon as we get
XSchema going I shall convert the DTD :-)


Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)