[ba-ohs-talk] On Groves
I just got back from Extreme Markup Languages 2002 in Montreal. There have
been some really amazing events that, I think, impact the OHS movement in a
large way. One of those is probably going to be called Groves4J. (01)
What's Groves4J? (02)
Groves are an SGML/HyTime invention, mostly due to Steven Newcomb, that
give you one simple addressing API which allows addressability of *any*
document 'out there'. *any* refers to such kinds of documents as PDF,
Word, Tex, Spreadsheet, and so forth, so long as somebody writes small
scripts to adapt those document types to the common API. Such scripts are
available already, though transliterations to Java will be required. (03)
Groves render such documents addressable to any arbitrary level of
granularity. Groves have been around for quite a while now, but, finally,
they will be going open source. Two versions are going to exist, one in
Python, and one in Java (Groves4J -- due to Graham Moore) and will appear
at probably groves4j.sourceforge.net real soon now. Groves4J is intended
to be a plug in tool that will adapt directly to the topic map engine
TM4J.sourceforge.net, and may, as well, serve as another datatype for
NODAL.sourceforge.net (04)
Following that, we will just need HyTime4J (which, perhaps, could fall out
of Groves4J) and then we would have all the power the SGML folks have had
all along. (05)
Cheers
Jack (06)