Revealing digital documents - concealed structures in data

Jakob Voß
Revealing digital documents
Concealed structures in data
http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5832
http://aboutdata.org

International Conference on Theory
and Practice in Digital Libraries (TPDL)
Doctoral Consortium, Berlin 2011-09-25

question

how are (digital) documents
structured and described?

Jakob Voß: Revealing digital documents. Concealed structures in data. TPDL 2011, Sep. 25th http://aboutdata.org

what is a document?

“[...] any physical or symbolic sign, preserved
or recorded, intended to represent, to
reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or
conceptual phenomenon” – Suzanne Briet

“[...] consists of anything that someone wishes
to store. A document is something designated
by a person to be a document [...]“ – Ted Nelson


scope

digital documents
somehow recorded (stable),
eventually as sequence of bits


CR2, AAF, AAT, ADL, AES Core Audio, AES Process History, AGLS, Alleg
SCII, ASN.1, Atom, BIBO, BibTeX, BISAC, BPEL, BPMN, BSON, CanCor
CO, CDR, CDWA, CDWA Lite, CIDOC/CRM, CQL, CSDGM, CSV, DACS
ata Committee Content Standard, DC, DCAM, DDC, DDI, DDL, DFDL, DI
G35, DjVU, DOM, DTD, Dublin Core, DwC, EAC, EAC-CPF, EAD, ebXM
ECN, Ediakt, EDIFAKT, eduPerson, EML, ERM, Etch, EXIF, Federal
eographic, FOAF, FRAD, FRBR, FRSAD, FRSAR, GEM, GILS, GKD, GM
ssian, HTML, HTTP, ID3, IDL, IEEE/LOM, indecs, inetOrgPerson, INI, IPT
I, ISAAR(CPF), ISAD(G), ISBD, ISBN, ISO 19115, ISO 19119, JSON, KM
there is not one
LCC, LCSH, LDAP, Linked Data, LMER, MAB2, MADS, MARC, MARC21
RC Relator Codes, MARCXML, MathML, MEI, MESH, METS, METS Rig
single document format
MFC, MGraph, MIX, MO, MODS, MOTS, MPEG-21 , MPEG-7, MSchema
seumDat, MusicXML, MXF, NewsML, NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD, NIAM, O
OAI-ORE, OAI-PMH, OAIS, ODRL, ONIX, Ontology for Media, OODBMS
OpenDocument, OpenSearch, OpenURL, ORM, OWL, PB Core, PDF, PI
ca+, Pica3, PND, PREMIS, PRISM, Proto, QDC, RAD, RAK, RDA, RDBM
DF, RDFS, RDF/XML, Relax NG, RELAX NG, Resource, RIS, RSS, RSW
Schematron, SCORM, SDXF, Seel, S-EXP, SGML, SIOC, SKOS, SMIL,
PECTRUM, SQL, SRU/SRW, SWAP, SWB, TEI, TEX, TextMD, TGM I, TG
TGN, Thrift, Topic Maps, UCS, ULAN, UML, unAPI, UNIMARC, URI, UTF
ard, Vorbis Comment, VRA, VSO Data Model, XDR, XMetaDiss, XML, XM

thesis

but there are common patterns
on all levels of description,
independent from
particular technologies


examples of particular technologies
XML relational databases
● Unicode ● Relational Model
● XML Infoset ● SQL
● XML Schema ● Entity-Relationship-
● Xpath Diagrams

families of related standards


method

not statistical
this would limit my research to
one level and technology of
description


method

phenomenological
data description in all of its forms
as it appears in our experience


phenomenological method

data description analyzed
as phenomena:
1. critical intuiting
(experience)
2. analyzing structures,
Hegel free of known
Husserl categories
Merleau-Ponty*
3. describing the essence

* Image CC-BY Pierre-Alain Gouanvic


results
1) Categorization
of data structuring methods
2) Collection
of data structuring paradigms
3) Pattern language
of data patterns


result 1: categorization of methods
● encodings express data
(UTF-8 Unicode, IEEE floating point, Base64…)
● file and database systems store data
● identifiers and query languages refer to data
● data structuring and markup languages
structure data
● schema languages constrain and validate data
● conceptual models describe data

¡Concrete methods appear as combinations of categories!


result 2: paradigms
● Document- or Object-oriented approach
● Document-oriented (e.g. ordered tree with
tagged character strings: XML, Relax NG…)
⇒ descriptive data description
● Object-oriented (objects with properties and
defined value spaces: XML Schema, UML…)
⇒ prescriptive data description


result 2: paradigms
● Entities and connections

Jakob 1979

born
Jakob 1979

Jakob Birth 1979


result 2: paradigms
● Layers of abstraction
● Standards and rules
● Collections and types
● Granularity


result 3: patterns
● patterns as systematic tool for describing good design
practice, introduced by Christopher Alexander:
“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and
over again in our environment, and then describes the
core of the solution to that problem […]”
● Adopted as design patterns in software engineering
● Collected in a pattern language with meaningful
connections between patterns (network of patterns).


result 3: patterns
collection

separator known size

sequence

position ordered set array


applications
● data archeology
● In 200 years someone finds snapshots and
archives of Wikipedia in different forms
(SQL, XML, Wikitext, DBPedia, HTML…)
● What are significant parts?
How relate parts to each other?


… another document

to give a simple example…



sequence with delimiter




grouping of sequences with delimiter




grouping of sequences with delimiter

encoding (morse code)
D A T A P A T T E R N S

Revealing digital documents - concealed structures in data

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