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Structured-Document Processing Languages (Spring 2006) Course Homepage
Rakenteisten dokumenttien käsittelykielet (kevät 2006) -kurssin kotisivu
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Tietojenkäsittelytieteen syventävien opintojen (III-V vuosi) kurssi (3 ov/6 op)
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Structured-Document Processing Languages is an elective
graduate level (laudatur) course (3 cu/6 ECTS cp) in Computer Science.
Goals of the course:
To get familiar with the central
models and languages for manipulating, representing,
transforming and querying structured (XML) documents.
Announcements
The course consists of ...
- 16 * 2 hours of lectures
(March 29 - May 24, 2006).
The first lecture takes place on Wednesday March 29, 2006, at 8.15-10 in class E26-27.
(Please check the on-line schedule for possible updates. Any unexpected changes will be announced at the top of
this page, too.)
A preliminary course syllabus is available
here.
The course will follow for the most part the
Spring 2005 version of
the course, but I may update or change some of the contents, though.
Lectures are given by professor
Pekka Kilpeläinen.
Language of instruction:
If there is demand (say, by at least two active participants)
the course will be given in English.
Otherwise the course will be given in Finnish.
(For communication, either English of Finnish can be used.)
- 7 * 2 hours of exercise sessions (April 6 - May 30)
The first
exercise group is chaired by
Mikko Saesmaa, and the second one by Pekka Kilpeläinen.
A practical XML manipulation course project will be assigned
as a part of the exercises.
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Final exam Wednesday, May 31, 2006, at 8-12 in L2;
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Retake on Tuesday, June 20, 2006, at 8-12 in L21,L22.
Grading:
The grade is determined by the formula
round(6*Exam + 2*Exerc - 2.5) ,
where Exam is the fraction of given exam points out of the maximum,
and Exerc is the fraction of solved exercise assignments out of the
total. (Examples of grades given by the formula are shown here.)
The lowest accepted grade is 1, and the highest grade is 5.
A minimum of 50 % of exam points is required for passing the course.
Please notice that exercise activity forms 25 % of the grade.
Actively solving homework assignments is central for learning to
understand and to apply the techniques; The process of
working on the assignments is more
important than the "solutions"
that are discussed at the exercise sessions!
The exercise points can be taken into account for grading
the first retake exam,
too, if that yields a better
result, but not for the later retake exams.
Material
Copies of lecture slides
and exercise assignments
will be made available online.
There is no single textbook for the course.
The course is mainly based on original articles and
technical specifications,
most of which are available as
on-line references.
I highly recommend that you learn to use these original sources, which
contain the correct authoritative specifications, often even in quite a
readable form!
There are numerous superficial, often slightly erroneous, and
quickly out-dated books about XML technology.
The following are reasonably good, and could be used as background literature:
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"XML - How to Program" by Deitel, Deitel, Nieto, Lin and Sadhu
(Prentice Hall, 2001) gives a good
practical grasp on some of the topics of the course (and many others).
The book should be available in the department library.
On the negative side, this book starts to be outdated on many of its topics.
- "XSLT Programmer's Reference" by Michael Kay (Wrox Press, 2000; never versions may exist)
is the best reference book for XSLT programming that I
have come across.
- I am currently browsing
"An Introduction to XML and Web Technologies" by Anders Møller and
Michael Schwartzbach (Addison-Wesley, 2006). It would seem to give a reasonable high-level overview.
Lecture Notes (Slides)
Copies of slides will be delivered here prior to the lectures.
Please note that the slides 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 the contents of those lectures.
- Introduction (March 29)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- XML Document Instances and Grammars (March 29 - April 5)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- XML Schema Definition Language (April 5)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- XML Processor Interfaces - SAX (April 7)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
(Please bring also the SAX Quick Reference
with you in class; I'll probably refer to it, too.)
- Document Object Model (April 12)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
(Please bring also the DOM Quick Reference
with you in class; We'll probably refer to it, too.)
- JAXP: Java API for XML Processing (April 21)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- Introduction to Style Sheets (April 21, 26)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- Cascading Style Sheets (April 26 (and 28))
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- Document Transformations: XSLT (April 28 - May 3)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- Additional features, and computing with XSLT (May 5-10)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- XSL: Extensible Stylesheet Language (May 10 and 12)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- Querying XML Data and Documents (May 16-23)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
- Course Review (May 24)
[Reduced PDF for printing] *
[PowerPoint]
Exercise assignments
Session 1 (April 6/7)
Session 2 (April 20)
Session 3 (April 27)
Session 4 (May 4/5)
Session 5 (May 11)
Session 6 (May 22)
Session 7 (May 30)
Assumed background
- Subject studies of Computer Science, especially a course on
Data Structures and Algorithms
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Sufficient familiarity with programming and the computing environment at
the department.
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Basic knowledge of structured documents, e.g.,
from a course on Document Standards
("Johdatus dokumenttistandardeihin"); especially
familiarity with Web and HTML.
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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"), but not necessary.
Course feedback
A summary of student feedback is available
here.
Thanks for those 10 who returned the course feedback form.
Summaries of feedback from previous years:
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