1. Subcommittee 3D DATA SETS FOR LIBRARIES

2. SC 3D Exchange of dictionary data Cape Town, 2005-10-19 3(Cape Town/Radley)3 Donald Radley Chairman, SC3D

3. SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 3 Contents  Dictionary data exchange  Exchange formats  Problems with special characters  Format conversion  Dictionary validation  Demonstrations

4. 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

5. SC 3D 3WS(Cape Town/radley)3 : 5 Exchange formats  HTML – as exported from IEC dictionary  STEP Physical File format complying with ISO 10303-21  TAB-separated, CSV or other tabular formats compatible with spreadsheets  XML – DTD or schema  Simple ASCII tagged format

6. 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

7. 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\

8. 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

9. 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 61360-2  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?

10. 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

11. SC 3D Thank you for your attention. Any questions?