🚀 go-pugleaf

 
Eliot's recent posting reached me after I had already made a longer
statement about the role of DSSSL and HyTime. As I suggested there,
DSSSL includes only one semantic-specific processor at present, a
typographic one, but the developers intend to create additional SSPs

when the base standard is completed. One that is contemplated, I believe,
will take on some of Eliot's "data processing" issues.

As for the graphics question, I saw a recent recent posting from the
CALS Drawings and Graphics standards committee that raised the same
question. Long ago Charles Goldfarb published a paper "Graphics in an
Applicative Context" that touched on that subject, and Anders Berglund
later put some rudimentary examples in the original version of ISO
TR9573, Techniques for Using SGML. Last fall two of the CGM gurus,
Lofton Henderson and Geourge Carson, posed the same quesion to me,
wondering whether SGML could not somehow be used to give some structure
to CGM so that a document database manager could also search graphics
files. This is a question that should also be brought up with the
STEP/PDES folks in TC184, since they intend to create large databases
that include, among other things, text and graphics that will need
interconnection. HyTime is intended to manage documents that include
data in "foreign" notations, so perhaps someone will show how it can be
used to link into graphics without having to interpolate some of that
dreaded "markup" into CGM.

Jim Mason
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
masonjd@ornl.gov