Subcommittee 3D DATA SETS FOR LIBRARIES
SC 3D Exchange of dictionary data Cape Town, (Cape Town/Radley)3 Donald Radley Chairman, SC3D
SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 3 Contents Dictionary data exchange Exchange formats Problems with special characters Format conversion Dictionary validation Demonstrations
SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 4 Dictionary data exchange Computer-sensible data is essential for application of a data dictionary Exchange formats must be agreed between supplier and user It is not reasonable to expect all users to adopt the same format with their associated tools It follows that dictionaries should be made available in more than one format, or tools be provided to convert among formats
SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 5 Exchange formats HTML – as exported from IEC dictionary STEP Physical File format complying with ISO TAB-separated, CSV or other tabular formats compatible with spreadsheets XML – DTD or schema Simple ASCII tagged format
SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 6 Problems with special characters Non-ASCII characters (Greek letters, subscripts, superscripts) cause problems In principle, Unicode (UTF-8) can be used to represent Greek and other special characters Unicode appears to support only a few subscripts and superscripts Use of Unicode varies from format to format Conversion tools need to take this into account Transfer of special characters across applications is not transparent
SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 7 Unicode examples Greek letter α (alpha) Unicode value Decimal 945 Hexadecimal 03B1 HTML and SGML - α (or α) XML – α α is not accepted SPF – \X2\03B1\X0\
SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 8 Format conversion Tools for conversion between formats are essential Commercial tools exist for handling SPF and XML files and character-separated tables Few tools exist for conversion, for example from SPF to XML or vice-versa Validation of conversion tools is a problem
SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 9 Dictionary validation Semantic validation is the responsibility of the Validation Team Syntactic validation must be performed against the EXPRESS model in IEC Tools (parsers) exist for this purpose Currently, tools that will parse a dictionary operate on SPF files only Different parsers give different results Can a dictionary in any other format than SPF be said to comply with the model?
SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 10 Demonstrations Export of IEC dictionary data Export Conversion of downloaded IEC dictionary to SPF, XML and Tagged formats Conversion EXPRESSO parser EXPRESSO Proposed XML schema for dictionariesXML schema Conversion of Tagged format to character- separated tables (for input to IEC database) Conversioncharacter- separated tables Input templates for new class and DET definitions Input templates Using existing definitions as a basis for new ones Using
SC 3D Thank you for your attention. Any questions?