Thanks Ricardo.
Now I am not a great fan of MS Office but I am actually going to say that this looks pretty cool :)
I just put a quick form together based on the avowed.xsd, filled out a copy and validated it against the w3c RDF validator.
So yes you can build forms on the basis of XML Schema and yes the results can be valid RDF. So here we have a 'cool tool' for biologists to create XML by filling in forms and the resulting XML can also be valid RDF!
The only fly in the ointment is the need for every desktop to have a copy of InfoPath on it and no cross platform support etc. Good for inside larger organisations though.
Roger
Ricardo Scachetti Pereira wrote:
Roger,
Microsoft InfoPath 2003, which comes with Microsoft Office 2003 Professional, is supposed to do what you want.
It doesn't create a nice looking user interface automagically from an XML Schema, though. You need to load the schema and then design the form, by dragging the XML elements into it and adding captions, labels, etc. But once you do that, the user interface for filling in the form is kinda nice.
It comes with a number of silly templates for business use (invoices, time cards, etc). I loaded TCS schema v1.0 and designed a simple form using it just for fun. See the attached picture.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Ricardo
Roger Hyam wrote:
Can you point me in the direction of a tool that will generate interfaces for data editing from an arbitrary XML Schema - and works out the box? I presume that, as you bemoan the lack of them for RDF, they exist for XML Schema based documents.
I am not talking XML editors (Spy and friends) here I am talking pukka data editors for regular biologists to use. I gave up trying to find these tools a while back but they may now have reached maturity. There was all this promise that one would be able to define a document structure in XML Schema and distribute this to clients and they would just see groovy forms to fill in and manage data in a database somewhere. No more slog in designing user interfaces just one generic tool. I got excited about XForms but soon got over that. Is there a tool I can download and use with SDD, TCS and ABCD?
If I could get my hands on such a tool I could try it with one of my 'avowed' serialization schemas and then demonstrate that I am editing RDF with it - but that really would be confusing. Where are the generic XML tools you imply?
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