[ASL] the Active Schema Language : a new schema technology

[Philippe Poulard]

People familiar with DTD, Relax NG, W3C XML Schema, Schematron, and that
are aware of more recent works such as DSDL should recognize all of them
in the Active Schema Language.

Anyway, ASL differs slightly because it allows to switch from a content
model to another with any arbitrary complex condition that can't be
expressed usually in grammar based model for example ; another
difference is that ASL allows to compute content model boundaries
dynamically, whereas other schema technologies only provide hard-coded
values, at best (that's why ASL is an "active" schema technology).
ASL also provides a smart support for data types ; of course, it is
intending to be compliant with existing data type libraries such as W3C
XML Schema data types, but it also provide means to define new data
types very efficiently ; custom types are "semantic friendly", that is
to say that users can define a type where "0°C" is greater than "31°F"
As part of the Active Tags technologies, ASL can embed other modules,
for example to check with SQL if an attribute value is inside an RDBMS
table.
ASL provides many other features.
Designing an ASL instance (including defining data types) can be done
with only 20 tags.

I pretend that ASL allows to express much more assertions than other
schema technologies, but you are not obliged to believe me ; so, see by
yourself ! Read more here :
http://disc.inria.fr/perso/philippe....ve-schema.html
Enjoy your new toy.

An implementation will be provided soon.

Feedbacks (pros & cons) are welcome.
Active contribution too.
--
Cordialement,

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| Philippe Poulard |
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