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Henry S. Thompson's Home Page

XML Tools and Editor
XML Linking Architectures
W3C
	    Logo FNLP Winter Term 2009
Contacting me (including PGP key)
Index of all documents on this site of potential general interest


Language in Edinburgh

Context

I spend half my time at the Language Technology Group of HCRC in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. HCRC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems. I'm interested in Computational Linguistics, Data-Intensive Linguistics, Language Corpora and Corpus Management and Markup Architectures.

Since February 2005 my activities have focussed on my membership in the W3C Technical Architecture Group, but my core research interests have remained unchanged:

  1. Developing XML standards and XML-related tools (see below); I was involved in the W3C SGML Working Group, whose work led to the XML recommendation: Extensible Markup Language (XML), and am currently a member of the XML Core and XML Schema working groups;
  2. Articulating a theory of the timing of individual contributions to conversation.

If you're interested in pursuing an MSc or PhD in one of these areas, please see the Informatics postgraduate prospectus and/or get in touch with me.

The other half of my time I am a member of the W3C Team.

In between my two day jobs, I do consulting and training work on XML and XML Schema and run an XML-related startup, Markup Technology, which has developed a powerful XML runtime for XML pipelines.


XML Tools (LT XML, XED and XSV)

Version 1.2 of LT XML, a fully compliant XML tool kit and API for WIN32 and UN*X platforms, is available.

The beta of XED, my XML document instance editor is now available.

The current version of XSV, an XML Schema validator, is available via a web interface.

An add-on to Python's SAX functionality providing a simple 'pull'-style interface PullFromSAX.py

The beta version of xslj, an old (not-standard) XSL to DSSSL translator is still available.


XML Linking Architectures

I'm committed to exploring the use of standoff markup to improve annotation management in complex datasets: the underlying techonology is described in my SGML Europe '97 paper. My presentation to the COCOSDA meeting in Rhodes discusses the application of this technology to spoken language transcripts, available as Powerpoint v.7 version, Powerpoint v.4 version and quick and dirty HTML from Powerpoint outline.


DSSSL Tools (DSC)

This section is of historical interest only at this point -- I haven't worked on this stuff for years.

DSC version 2.0, an online syntax checker, normaliser and implementation framework for DSSSL, based on embedding a full R4RS Scheme interpreter in James Clark's SP parser, is available for downloading. For more information, see the release announcement, which describes dsc in more detail.

Version 2.0, as demonstrated at SGML/XML '97 in November 1997, provides a much richer implementation framework than previous versions, including the full query language and the transformation language.

DSSSL users might find my index to DSSSL procedures by prototype useful. I've also produced a summary of information about the copyright status of the DSSSL standard and pointers to various electronic versions thereof.

For DSSSL/SGML implementation mavens, heres an illustrated example of an SGML source grove.


Presentations and Tutorials

I regularly give presentations and tutorials on markup- and style-related subject. Please consult the presentation slides and course notes and associated examples to see whats available (this page is quite out of date, but I have more up-to-date material available on request). If looking at the tutorial materials suggests you'd like me to give such a tutorial at your institution, please get in touch.


Address

Postal:
Henry S. Thompson
4.03 Informatics Forum
10 Crichton Street
Edinburgh EH8 9AB
SCOTLAND

Email:
ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
PGP key:
HST's GnuPG Public Key
Tel:
+44 (0)131 650 4440
Mobile:
+44 (0)7866 471 388
Fax:
+44 (0)131 651 1426 Valid HTML 4.01!
 
Photo (if you must)
My wife Catharine runs the OPENspace Research Centre.
We intend to develop ShutYourFacebook.com as a website for promoting outdoor activities.