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?