Subcommittee 3DDATA SETS FOR LIBRARIES

SC 3D

Exchange of dictionary data

Cape Town, 2005-10-193(Cape Town/Radley)3

Donald RadleyChairman, SC3D

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Contents

Dictionary data exchange Exchange formats Problems with special characters Format conversion Dictionary validation Demonstrations

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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

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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

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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

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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\

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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

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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?

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Demonstrations

Export of IEC dictionary data Conversion of downloaded IEC dictionary to

SPF, XML and Tagged formats EXPRESSO parser Proposed XML schema for dictionaries Conversion of Tagged format to character-

separated tables (for input to IEC database) Input templates for new class and DET

definitions Using existing definitions as a basis for new

ones

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Thank you for your attention.Any questions?