Tuesday, March 8, 2005
2:30 pm - 3:20 pm

Semantic transparency is the ability for machines to properly interpret the content of documents (similar to "machine readability"). There are techniques in development for ensuring semantic transparency of XML documents, but the foundation for semantic transparency is good XML vocabulary design. Regardless of schema language, query and transform technology, poorly-designed XML leads to systems that are difficult and expensive to maintain, and complicates the automation of the XML processing, never mind its availability to pseudo-intelligent agents. Unfortunately, developers have not tended to take data modeling and XML design as seriously as they take the design of applications code. This presentation covers specifics of good XML design, focusing on areas of concern that affect semantic transparency.

Uche Ogbuji is a computer engineer with over a decade's experience in professional consulting on software development, data design and distributed systems. He has worked with XML since early 1998, and in Web Services since late 2000. He co-develops 4Suite, an open-source platform for XML and RDF processing. He is lead designer of the Versa query language for RDF, and several other influential technical reports. He is a columnist for IBM developerWorks, Application Development Trends and XML.com. He has written almost 200 articles on XML, Web Services and RDF in recognized publications and speaks extensively at conferences worldwide. He received the 2003 ActiveState Active Award for outstanding contribution in the profession of software development in the topic of XSLT.