Subcommittee 3 D DATA SETS FOR LIBRARIES 1

SC 3 D Exchange of dictionary data Cape Town, 2005 -10 -19 3(Cape Town/Radley)3 Donald Radley Chairman, SC 3 D

SC 3 D Contents 4 Dictionary data exchange 4 Exchange formats 4 Problems with special characters 4 Format conversion 4 Dictionary validation 4 Demonstrations 3

SC 3 D Dictionary data exchange 4 Computer-sensible data is essential for application of a data dictionary 4 Exchange formats must be agreed between supplier and user 4 It is not reasonable to expect all users to adopt the same format with their associated tools 4 It follows that dictionaries should be made available in more than one format, or tools be provided to convert among formats 4

SC 3 D Exchange formats 4 HTML – as exported from IEC dictionary 4 STEP Physical File format complying with ISO 10303 -21 4 TAB-separated, CSV or other tabular formats compatible with spreadsheets 4 XML – DTD or schema 4 Simple ASCII tagged format 5

SC 3 D Problems with special characters 4 Non-ASCII characters (Greek letters, subscripts, superscripts) cause problems 4 In principle, Unicode (UTF-8) can be used to represent Greek and other special characters 4 Unicode appears to support only a few subscripts and superscripts 4 Use of Unicode varies from format to format 4 Conversion tools need to take this into account 4 Transfer of special characters across applications is not transparent 6

SC 3 D Unicode examples 4 Greek letter α (alpha) 4 Unicode value 4 Decimal 945 4 Hexadecimal 03 B 1 4 HTML and SGML - α (or α ) 4 XML – α 4 α is not accepted 4 SPF – X 23 B 1X 0 7

SC 3 D Format conversion 4 Tools for conversion between formats are essential 4 Commercial tools exist for handling SPF and XML files and character-separated tables 4 Few tools exist for conversion, for example from SPF to XML or vice-versa 4 Validation of conversion tools is a problem 8

SC 3 D Dictionary validation 4 Semantic validation is the responsibility of the Validation Team 4 Syntactic validation must be performed against the EXPRESS model in IEC 61360 -2 4 Tools (parsers) exist for this purpose 4 Currently, tools that will parse a dictionary operate on SPF files only 4 Different parsers give different results 4 Can a dictionary in any other format than SPF be said to comply with the model? 9

SC 3 D Demonstrations 4 Export of IEC dictionary data 4 Conversion of downloaded IEC dictionary to SPF, XML and Tagged formats 4 EXPRESSO parser 4 Proposed XML schema for dictionaries 4 Conversion of Tagged format to characterseparated tables (for input to IEC database) 4 Input templates for new class and DET definitions 4 Using existing definitions as a basis for new ones 10

SC 3 D Thank you for your attention. Any questions?