JP2005149269A - System for processing structured document - Google Patents

Abstract

<P>PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a system for processing a structured document that can reduce labor for programming, in a software program for handling a structured document, by eliminating data conversion processing for processing of document contents and data extraction processing for selection of necessary data. <P>SOLUTION: A structured document holds a document structure definition represented by declarations of document elements forming document contents and by a set of semantic relations defined between the document elements, and a set of instances of the respective document elements matching the document structure definition. The system for processing a structured document, which comprises data reading means for reading the instances of document elements from the structured document and editing them into data processible by a software program to provide them, comprises basic data structure selecting means for selecting and specifying a data structure of the data provided by the data reading means, from known basic data structures or object structures, such as array, set, list, tree, graph and table structures. <P>COPYRIGHT: (C)2005,JPO&NCIPI

Description

  The present invention relates to a structured document processing system, and more particularly to a middleware system that provides an electronic document as input and provides content information to other software programs as processing target data.

Conventionally, XML (Extensible Markup Language) is well known as a method for realizing structured documents. A structured document according to this implementation method follows a document structure definition based on a tree-type logical structure.
Therefore, conventionally, for these structured documents, there is generally a middleware system that organizes the content information of the read structured document based on a tree-type data structure and provides it to other software programs as processing target data. It's being used.
There is W3C DOM (Document Object Model) as a standard that defines such a tree-type data structure and middleware system specifications.

Software programs that use structured documents as processing target data are created for various purposes.
The various purposes include, for example, a display purpose for displaying the content information of the structured document on the display screen and presenting it to the user, and a verification purpose for confirming whether the content information of the structured document is appropriate for some standard. And the purpose of aggregating content information of a plurality of structured documents.
A software program corresponding to each purpose is created using each data structure and algorithm in order to realize a function for achieving each purpose.
Since the data structures used are designed to realize individual functions, they generally have different structures for each function.
On the other hand, if the processing target data provided by the middleware system has a general data structure such as a tree structure, the software program converts the processing target data into a data structure suitable for each function. It was necessary to perform data conversion processing for conversion.
Further, the software program corresponding to each purpose extracts the contents necessary to achieve each purpose from the structured document and sets it as a processing target.
A structured document can hold document contents that are given various meanings according to various purposes in a single document.
For example, a document consisting of a group of document elements related to the format and layout order required for display purposes, and a document consisting of groups of document elements related to express an arithmetic expression required for quantitative verification purposes Content can coexist and overlap within a single document.
For a structured document including a plurality of document contents based on a plurality of semantic relationships as described above, the software program extracts data to be processed for each function from the entire structured document. Had to do.

The present invention has been made to solve the problems of the prior art, and an object of the present invention is to provide a software program by enabling the data conversion process and the data extraction process in a software program to be omitted. It is to reduce the time and effort for creating.
The above and other objects and novel features of the present invention will become apparent from the description of this specification and the accompanying drawings.

In order to achieve the above-described object, in the present invention, a document structure definition expressed by a declaration (schema) of document elements constituting document contents and a set of semantic relationships (hyperlink) defined between the document elements. For a structured document that holds a set of actual values of each document element in response to the document structure definition, the actual value of the document element is read from the structured document and edited into data that can be processed by a software program. In the structured document processing system provided with the data reading means to be provided, a means is provided for referring to the document contents extracted according to the purpose through the data structure according to the purpose for the structured document.
In the middleware system using the structured document processing system according to the first aspect, the data structure of the processing target data provided from the data reading means can be changed using the basic data structure selecting means.
The basic data structure selection means is a method of selecting and instructing a data editing method at the time of data reading from a known basic data structure or object structure prepared in advance. There is no need to specify.
Therefore, the function to be realized by the software program is general, and if it can be appropriately created with either a basic data structure or an object structure, it is necessary to perform the data conversion process in the software program. Disappears.

In the middleware system based on the structured document processing system according to claim 2, the meaning of the content of the processing target data provided from the data reading means is classified by a specific attribute of the semantic relation using the semantic relation extracting means. It can be limited to only a part focusing on the type of relationship.
Therefore, if the set of semantic relationships in the sentence structure definition is classified by the specific attribute value of the semantic relationship for each processing purpose, the type of semantic relationship corresponds to the processing purpose. There is no need to perform the data extraction process.
The middleware system according to the structured document processing system according to claim 3, wherein in the structured document processing system according to claim 1, a data structure or object structure suitable for a function to be realized by a software program is selected as a data structure If it does not exist as a choice of means, it can be newly created as a runtime library, added to the choice and made selectable thereafter, and the scope of application of the structured document processing system is expanded. Can continue.

The effects obtained by the representative ones of the inventions disclosed in the present application will be briefly described as follows.
According to the present invention, in a software program that handles structured documents, it is possible to create a program by omitting data conversion processing for processing the document contents by the program and data extraction processing for selecting necessary data. Can be reduced.

Hereinafter, embodiments of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the drawings.
In all the drawings for explaining the embodiments, parts having the same functions are given the same reference numerals, and repeated explanation thereof is omitted.
[Function block diagram]
FIG. 1 is a functional block diagram showing a schematic configuration of a structured document processing system according to an embodiment of the present invention.
The structured document processing system 1 is a system that provides document contents of a structured document as processing target data in response to a request from the business processing program 2. Here, the structured document processing system 1 is constituted by, for example, a general-purpose personal computer.
The structured document processing system 1 is connected to the document structure definition recording medium 3 and the structured document recording medium 4 in order to read the document structure definition and the structured document requested by the business processing program 2.
For example, the programming terminal 5 constituted by a keyboard, a mouse, and the like is connected for the user to specify an execution parameter before the structured document processing system 1 is executed.
The data reading means 12 reads the actual value of the document element from the structured document, and edits and provides the data that can be processed by the business processing program 2.

The semantic relationship extraction unit 11 determines the type of each semantic relationship from the set of semantic relationships in the document structure definition according to the attribute value of the semantic relationship, and extracts a subset based on the determined type.
When reading the actual value of the document element from the structured document, the data reading unit 12 reads only the document element related to the extracted subset.
The basic data structure selection unit 13 indicates the data structure of data to be provided by the data reading unit 12.
The data structure instruction is given by the user through the programming terminal 5 before the structured document processing system 1 is executed.
The basic data structure selection means 13 presents known basic data structure or object structure options such as an array, a set, a list, a tree, a graph, and a table structure through the programming terminal 5. Choose a data structure suitable for your needs.
By creating the data structure or object structure selected through the basic data structure selection means 13 as a runtime library for implementing a predetermined connection specification, the basic data structure selection is performed by combining the runtime library. It is possible to add to the options in the means 13.

[Refer to polymorphic structured documents by basic data structure selection]
A method for editing different data structures from the same structured document will be described with reference to FIGS. 2, 3, 4, and 5.
FIG. 2 is an example of a document structure definition. Here, the document structure definition is described by tags enclosed in square brackets.
The document element declaration 21 enumerates and declares document elements that can be described in the structured document. The declaration of one document element is described with the item tag, and each name is specified with the name attribute.
The semantic relation set 22 is a list of semantic relations between a pair of document elements.
One semantic relationship declaration is described by an edge tag, and the type of semantic relationship is expressed by a type attribute. The from tag and the to tag nested in the edge tag indicate the names of document elements corresponding to both ends of the semantic relationship.
For example, if the type attribute is “part” and the purchase order is specified with the from tag and the order number is specified with the to tag, the semantic relationship is “part” between the document element “order” and the document element “note”. Declares that there is a kind of semantic relationship called.
FIG. 3 is an example of a structured document created according to the document structure definition shown in FIG.
In FIG. 3, in the structured document 31, the name of the document element declared in the document element declaration 21 is used as a tag name, and an actual value is given to each document element. For example, an actual value of 0123 is given to the document element “note number”.

4 extracts the values of the structured document shown in FIG. 3 while focusing on the types of semantic relationships “part” and “aggregation” in accordance with the document structure definition shown in FIG. An example of editing a certain tree structure is illustrated.
In the example shown in FIG. 4, the basic data structure selection unit 13 indicates a tree structure as the data structure of data to be provided by the data reading unit 12.
In the tree structure according to the example of FIG. 4, a tree structure is configured with a set of values corresponding to document elements as leaves 41 and individual semantic relationships or nested relationships between document elements as branches 42.
FIG. 5 extracts the values of the structured document shown in FIG. 3 by focusing on the types of semantic relationships “part” and “aggregation” in accordance with the document structure definition shown in FIG. An example of editing into an array structure is illustrated.
In the example shown in FIG. 5, the basic data structure selection unit 13 indicates an array structure as the data structure of data to be provided by the data reading unit 12.
In the array structure according to the example of FIG. 5, one line corresponding to one array element is represented by a line number field, a heading field 5 f, and a value field 52.
The name of the document element is described in the heading column 51, the corresponding value is described in the value column 52, and the individual semantic relationship or the nested relationship of the document elements is expressed in the three column arrangement order of the heading column 51.
The example shown in FIG. 4 and the example shown in FIG. 5 express the same document content with different data structures.
In this way, different data structures are selected according to the implementation algorithm of the business processing program 2.

[Refer to multifaceted structured documents by extracting semantic relations]
6 extracts the values of the structured document shown in FIG. 3 while paying attention to the semantic relation type “arithmetic” in accordance with the document structure definition shown in FIG. 2, and the same tree structure as shown in FIG. An example of editing is shown in FIG.
As mentioned above, the invention made by the present inventor has been specifically described based on the above embodiments. However, the present invention is not limited to the above embodiments, and various modifications can be made without departing from the scope of the invention. Of course.

It is a functional block diagram which shows schematic structure of the processing system of the structured document of the Example of this invention. It is a figure which shows an example of a document structure definition. It is a figure which shows an example of a structured document. It is an example of the basic data structure which shows an example of the data editing by the data reading means shown in FIG. It is an example of the basic data structure which shows another example of the data editing by the data reading means shown in FIG. It is an example of the basic data structure for showing the effect of the semantic relationship extraction means shown in FIG.

Explanation of symbols

DESCRIPTION OF SYMBOLS 1 Processing system of structured document 2 Business processing program 3 Document structure definition recording medium 4 Structured document recording medium 11 Semantic relation extraction means 12 Data reading means 13 Basic data structure selection means 21 Document element declaration 22 Semantic relation set 31 Structure Document

Claims (3)

A document structure definition expressed by a declaration of document elements constituting the document content, a set of semantic relations defined between the document elements, and a set of actual values of each document element corresponding to the document structure definition In a structured document processing system including a data reading unit that reads a realized value of a document element from a structured document and edits and provides it to data that can be processed by a software program for the structured document to be held.
Basic data structure selection for indicating and selecting the data structure of data provided by the data reading means from among known basic data structures or object structures such as arrays, sets, lists, trees, graphs, and table structures A structured document processing system comprising: means. Semantic relationship extraction means for determining the type of each semantic relationship from the set of semantic relationships in the document structure definition according to the attribute value of the semantic relationship, and extracting a subset based on the determined type,
2. The structured document according to claim 1, wherein when the data reading means reads the actual value of the document element from the structured document, only the document element related to the extracted subset is read. Processing system.   By creating the data structure or object structure selected through the basic data structure selection means as a runtime library that implements a predetermined connection specification, the basic data structure selection is performed by combining the runtime library. The structured document processing system according to claim 1, wherein the system can be added to options in the means.

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