ALBConsults       

Navigate the site: XBRLXSLTXSLXML

Home

  XBRL

  XSLT

  XSL FO

  XML

Information in an Enterprise

One of the most valuable assets in an enterprise is its information. Traditionally the focus was on data stored in classical databases, e.g. relational, and the data was typically financial data, personnel data, and similar. More and more people have come to realize that the vital data is much broader and includes a large amount of "text" data; the amount of this kind of data is also typically much larger. To make optimum use of this additional data has a set of challenges that include ensuring that the planning for re-use, re-purposing, and integration of this data with all other kinds of data in the enterprise is carefully thought out. In many cases the same information "fragments" is re-used in a multitude of contexts, e.g. annual report, marketing material, and product documentation. The information also needs to be re-usable in different delivery mechanisms, e.g. HTML for the web, PDF for the web, and traditional printed matter.

A key aspect is the modeling of the data and the representation of the data. More and more the use of Open Standards has been a crucial aspect as this ensures a longer life span of the data and a mix and match of product components from different vendors. Over the last several years XML - the eXtensible Markup Language - has emerged as a key component in managing "text" and "relational" data and the integration of this data.

Anders Berglund of ALB Consults is a leader in the development of many of the Open Standards in this area and has solid knowledge and experience of their application.

Contact information

albbcatf at gmail dot com

Areas of Consulting

Management Planning

  • Needs analysis
  • Goal Development
  • System and Workflow Analysis

Data Modeling and Representation

  • Data/Document Analysis
  • "Schema" Creation
  • Application Analysis and Design
  • Software Specification
  • Information Management Issues

Exploiting the Data

  • Workflow Analysis
  • Application Analysis and Design
  • Software Specification
  • Development of Transformation and Stylesheets for XSLT and XSL FO

Legacy Data

  • Evaluation
  • Data Conversion Strategy

Training

  • Introduction to XML, XSLT, XSL FO
  • Document Analysis
  • XML
  • XSLT
  • XSL Formatting Objects
  • XBRL

See also case studies in each section.

Anders Berglund Biography

He has been involved in information modeling and markup languages for a quarter of a century. He has worked on the creation of a number of the ISO and World Wide Web consortium standards in this area.

  • 1986-1998. Member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC18/WG8, currently ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34 (where the SGML standard was developed). Editor of ISO/IEC/JTC1 9573 (Techniques for Using SGML). Main contributor to ISO/IEC 10179 (DSSSL). A good introduction to markup languages and these standards as well as XML can be found in Wikipedia.
  • 1997-present. Member of the W3C eXtensible Style Language working group. Principal author of the "Formatting Objects" 1.0 and 1.1. Editor of XPath 2.0. Editor of XSL 1.1. Editor of XQuery 1.1 and XPath 2.1 Data Model. Co-author of the submission to the W3C for XSL.
  • While working at CERN (1973-1987) he implemented an SGML based publishing application that greatly influenced the design of HTML.
  • 1987-1992. Director, Electronic Publishing Services at the ISO Central Secretariat, where he was responsible for the implementation of an SGML based publishing system for ISO standards.
  • 1993-1999. Principal Software Engineer at Inso Corporation (formerly EBT), where one of the projects he worked on was developing DynaTag, an application for "tagging" word processor data and convert the documents to SGML with semantically meaningful markup. Developed converters from FrameMaker's MIF format and Interleaf ASCII to SGML conforming to the "Rainbow" DTD.
  • 1999-2009. Research Staff Member at IBM TJ Watson Research, where he made major contributions to XML transformation languages; XSLT, XPath, and XSL developed in the W3C eXtensible Style Language working group. His work on the XSL family of standards was part of the IBM Research Extraordinary Accomplishment "Standards Leadership: The Evolution from XML to Web Services to SOA". The last time IBM awarded an extraordinary accomplishment in the software area was for the relational database more than two decades ago. He also worked on the data modeling and XML aspects of XBRL - the eXtensible Business Reporting Language. He was also an "internal consultant" to various IBM groups on information modeling, markup languages and XML related standards.