Hello, I'm far from an XML expert, but I believe in XML for data
interchange.
and use it in one other project.
>
> No one I know of is currently working on an XML adapter for
> VisAD, but it would be a good thing. Ideally it would be an
> extension of visad.data.Form and reside in the visad.data.xml
> package. It would require some decisions about how XML fields
> get mapped to the VisAD data model. Certainly a table full of
> records with named fields could be mapped to a FunctionType
> like:
>
> (index -> (field1, field2, ..., fieldN))
>
> where 'index' is just an ordinal record number in the table,
> and the fields may be either numerical or text. You could
> also do nested tables as nested FunctionTypes.
> I don't know enough about XML to know if it defines standard
> fields for units, coordinate systems, topologies, missing
> values, etc.
You can define any units, coordinate systems, etc. in DTDs -- it doesn't
support anyuthing like that by default.
The problem is that XML on purpose doesn't do anything like
type-checking.
i.e. you can't say that a field in a DTD must be a positive integer.
>
> If you or anyone wants to do any of this, we will be supportive
> and also interested in helping to make your work available to
> the VisAD community, by web links or inclusion of source with
> our distribution.
Right now, I have really tight constraints, but if s.b. else helps,
I'd try my best to help.
We would have to do two things:
-think about the DTDs we're interested in to give meaningful
describtion.
-finally do the coding, but that is the easier part, as really good XML
parsers
exist.
Thanks
Armin
