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SRF+BML: Simple Report Format and Bibliography Markup Language

Abstract

This is a short note about SRF+BML: Simple Report Format and Bibliography Markup Language, an XML based markup language and XSLT-stylesheet used for writing the project and diploma thesis of the TeamWeb-project [TW].

Objective

The objective of SRF+BML is creating a simple to use and yet powerful markup language for scientific articles, project thesis, diploma thesis and any other kind of paper that consists of sections, defines terms and uses citations. There are a few projects with seemingly similar objectives (e.g. [ETDML], but they seem too complex and hard to learn, or do not meet the needs of the author.

Usage overview

ScAML is rather simple and straightforward to use. It consists of a DTD for the actual article, which includes a subset of XHTML, and another DTD for the bibliography, which is based on BibTeX and its XML derivates (e.g. [BIBTEXML]). Furthermore, there is an extensible XSL stylesheet that is used to convert the paper source to HTML that shall display well on most current browsers (including formatting the bibliography). It should be easy to create XSL-stylesheets that create LaTeX and BibTeX from the source - however, that was beyond of the scope. Any volunteers?

To create a new document, one can simply use the following template, replace the placeholders and start writing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<scaML:article>
  <bibML:entry id="wagner02tracking" name="Wagner2002">
    <bibML:unpublished>
      <bibML:authors>
        <bibML:author first="Holger" middle="T." last="Wagner"
                      eMail="david@purple-sunshine.de"
                      homepage="http://www.purple-sunshine.de/" />
      </bibML:authors>
      <bibML:title>Tracking the Navigation Behavior of Web Communities</bibML:title>
      <bibML:month>March</bibML:month>
      <bibML:year>2002</bibML:year>
      <bibML:abstract>To be written when work is complete!</bibML:abstract>
      <bibML:keywords>
        <bibML:keyword>Web usage</bibML:keyword>
        <bibML:keyword>collaboration</bibML:keyword>
        <bibML:keyword>navigation behavior</bibML:keyword>
      </bibML:keywords>
      <bibML:url>http://www.someserver.org/somedir/projectThesis.shtml</bibML:url>
    </bibML:unpublished>
  </bibML:entry>
  <scaML:bibliography type="external" src="bibliography.xml" />
  <scaML:body>
    <scaML:section id="Intro" title="Introduction">
      <p>
        text
      </p>
      <scaML:subsection id="RWUsageMining" title="Web Usage Mining">
        <p>
          text
        </p>
      </scaML:subsection>
    </scaML:section>
  </scaML:body>
</scaML:article>

DTDs

For more information, see the annotated DTDs:
SRF DTD (plain DTD)
BML DTD (plain DTD)
XSL stylesheet for transforming ScAML documents to HTML (plain stylesheet)

References

Last modified: Sunday March 24 2002 by Holger (David) Wagner