Structured-Document Processing Languages (Spring 2003) Course Homepage

Rakenteisten dokumenttien käsittelykielet (kevät 2003) -kurssin kotisivu

• Structured-Document Processing Languages is an elective graduate level (laudatur) course (3 cu) in Computer Science.

Goals of the course: To familiarize with the central models and languages for manipulating, representing, transforming and querying structured (XML) documents.

Announcements

• April 1: The course feedback form was returned by 13 students. Thanks for providing the feedback. A summary of the feedback is available on-line.
• Mar 11: A question was raised at the last exercise session about the XPath/XSLT semantics of comparing node-sets. The issue is discussed in a note. (This is extra material and not required for the course exam.)
• Feb 28: There was a small but unpleasant typo on the first lecture slide about XML Wrapper: The last author (in the alphabetical order) of the XW reports was not (professor Martti) Penttonen but (M.Sc. Tommi) Penttinen, our teaching assistant and the main implementor of XW. Sorry for the slip, Tommi!
• Feb 27: The last lecture (Review of the Course) is given on Friday, February 28 at 12-14 in class E17 of the "IT building".
• Feb 24: Instructions for running XW (XML Wrapper) at the Department are available on-line.
• Feb 20:
  • Instructions for running Apache FOP at the Department are available on-line.
  • The example HTML result file activity_grp1.html of the course project contained a small error, which has been removed.
• Feb 12: Instructions for a Course Project, due to March 7, are available on-line.
• Feb 10: Instructions for running XSLT processors at the Department are available on-line.

Practical arrangements

The course consists of ...

• 16 * 2 hours of lectures

Lectures are given by professor Pekka Kilpeläinen.

Language of instruction: The course will be given in English. (For communication, either English of Finnish can be used.)

• 7 * 2 hours of exercise sessions (January 27 - March 10, Microteknia MT2)

Exercise sessions are chaired by Tommi Penttinen and Pekka Kilpeläinen.
At least one practical document manipulation "mini-project" is planned to be assigned as a part of the exercises.

Changes in the course schedule are possible; Please check the online schedules. (Especially, I try to move contact hours from the skiing holiday (March 3 - March 6) to earlier weeks.) If something changes I'll announce that at the top of this page.
A preliminary course syllabus is available here. The course will probably follow rather closely the Spring 2002 version of the course.

• Final exam Thursday, March 13, 2003, at 8-12 in L2; retake on Thursday, April 3, 2003, at 8-12 in L2.

Grading: (32*Exam/MaxExam + 12*HomeWork/MaxHomeWork - 8)/3. (The retake exam can be graded either based on this formula or on exam points only.) In either option, at least half of the exam points are required to pass the course. The lowest accepted grade is 3.

Please notice that the homework assignments form an essential part of the grading. Actively solving homework assignments is central for learning to understand and to apply the techniques; I would say that the process of working on the assignments is much more important than the actual "solutions" that are discussed at the exercise sessions!

Material

The lecture notes and homework assignments will be made available online.

There is no single textbook for the course. The course is largely based on original articles or technical specifications, most of which are available as on-line references.

The book "XML - How to Program" by Deitel, Deitel, Nieto, Lin and Sadhu (Prentice Hall, 2001) is recommended (but not necessary): It gives a good practical grasp on most of the topics of the course (and many others). One copy of the book is available in the department library for over-night loans.

Lecture notes

Copies of lecture notes will be delivered here prior to the lectures. Please note that the lecture notes are skeletons of lectures, that is, they are not written especially for self-study. If you cannot attend the lectures, you'd better study the references for those lectures.

1. Introduction (January 15) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
2. Document Instances and Grammars (January 15-21) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
3. XML Schema Definition Language (January 21) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
4. XML Processor Interfaces - SAX (January 23) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
5. Document Object Model (January 28) [Notes removed to protect individuals' email addresses in them]
6. JAXP: Java API for XML Processing (January 30) [Reduced PDF for printing (NB: if graphics appear dark, print the slides for better quality using PowerPoint)] * [PowerPoint]
7. Introduction to Style Sheets (January 30/February 4) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
8. Cascading Style Sheets (February 4/6) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
9. Document Transformations: XSLT (February 6 and 11) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
10. Additional features of XPath and XSLT (February 11 and 13) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
11. Computing with XSLT (February 13) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
12. XSL: Extensible Stylesheet Language (February 18 and 19) [Reduced PDF for printing (NB: if graphics appear dark, print the slides for better quality using PowerPoint)] * [PowerPoint]
13. Translating Data to XML (February 19, 20) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]
14. Querying XML Data and Documents (February 25, 27) [Reduced PDF for printing] * [PowerPoint]

Exercise homework assignments

Session 1 (January 27)
Session 2 (February 3)
Session 3 (February 10)
Session 4 (February 17)
Session 5 (February 24)
Session 6 (February 28/March 3)
Session 7 (March 10)

Selected solutions (link disabled)

Assumed background

• Sufficient competense wrt programming and the computing environment at the department.
• Basic knowledge of structured documents, e.g., from the course Document Standards ("Dokumenttistandardit").
• Familiarity with Web and HTML.
• Basic knowledge of context free grammars, regular expressions and automata may be useful, for example from a course on theory of computing (e.g., "Ohjelmoinnin ja laskennan teoria").