Syntactica Standards

Standards are one of the most important ways that organizations with similar requirements can share open source software. Syntactica has used the following web development and XML integration standards to create highly portable and vendor-lockin-free solutions for its customers. These standards have been very carefully chosen to be consistent with web standards as well as their fit with each other. Although most of these stardards are W3C recomendations, many are standard open source products that are used throughout the web.

XML: Extensible Markup Language. XML is the universal language for exchanging information between computers. XML is at the heart of our standards solutions and we feel there is no other technology that comes close the breath and scope of XML and its echo system.
XML Schema: XML Schemas are used to validate XML documents. They express the business rules of what elements are expected in an XML document and the data types associated with each XML element.
XPath: XPath is a universal standard for extracting data from and XML file. XPath provides a universal set of rules that can be used on both the client (within XForms) and server (XQuery).
XQuery: XQuery is the W3C standard for querying XML data. But unlike XSLT, XQuery was designed with large data sets and indexes in mind. XQuery is being extended in many ways by the W3C including fulltext extensions and scripting extensions. We find that XQuery is much easier to learn then XSLT and that XQuery provides the expressivity for both push and pull processing. We find that most users that are familiar with SQL can pick up XQuery very quickly. Although our staff has experience with XSLT we prefer XQuery for all of our work because we find it is much easier to extend, document and maintain. XQuery has become and entire server-side solution for us and many of our customers. We are also very fond of using XQuery typeswitch transforms and find that many large XSLT transforms can be quickly converted to use XQuery typeswitch transform that will utilize indexes.
XForms: XForms is the W3C standard for expressing complex web applications. XForms is simple and elegant and consistent with all other W3C standards including XML, XPath and RESTful services. We use the XSLTforms application to allow our forms to work with browsers that are not compliant with W3C standards.
Schematron: Schematron is a simple standard that allows you to express even the most complex business rules in simple XPath expressions. Schematron is ideal for doing data validation or for expressing complex business rules.
Apache UIMA: Apache UIMA is really a family of standards that allow for unstructured information analysis. Apache UIMA pipelines allow even non-programmers to be able to setup complex information processing pipelines.
RESTful Services: REST is the standard way to express services that are easy to use and easy to discover. Unlink the SOAP standard, REST services can take advantage of web caching.
XRX Web Application Architecture: XRX (XForms, REST, XQuery) is our "secret" weapon. It is an advanced web application architecture based on the "best of the best". It allows us to create web applications ten times faster then most other systems that depend on building object and relational layers. XRX applications empower the non-programmer to build complex web applications directly from an XML Schema drawing.
Blueprint CSS Framework: The Blueprint CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) framework allows Syntactica to build web applications that look consistent under all major browsers, even Internet Explorer. Blueprint uses a simple 24 column layout system so that our frameworks can easily manage content in multiple columns. Blueprint is known as a "reset" framework since it resets all of the browser incompatibilities to a single standard.
Resource Description Format (RDF): The Resource Description Format (RDF) is a way to express graphs within the context of the web. We love RDF because it allows us to merge data sets together and perform inference on these joined data sets.
Structured Knowledge Organization System (SKOS): Structured Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C standard for storing controlled vocabularies, glossaries and taxonomies. We use SKOS standards an concepts to help our customers create precise terms and definitions early in the software development lifecycle. This promotes consistent terminology, data element and business rules.
Saleable Vector Graphics (SVG): Syntactica the W3C Saleable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard and SVGKit to create graphical versions of XML models and information dashboards using efficient and compact line-art drawing. SVGKit allows SVG to even run on Intenet Explorer which does not support SVG natively. SVGKit uses fast native rendering in FireFox, Safari, Opera and Chrome. On Internet Explorer SVGKit translates vector graphics into Flash.
Atom: The Atom standard allows us to quickly create syndication feeds using consistent XML representations. This allows remote clients to know what data items have been updated.
Dublin Core: The Dublin Core Standard is composed of small set of data elements that store publication metadata. Dublin core element include items such as author, title, publisher, publication date, language, subject and rights. These 15 data elements can be used by many items that are published on a typical web site. By including Dublin Core metadata in our files tools such as the Zotero FireFox plugin can collect consistent bibliographic data on these items.
National Information Exchange Model (NIEM): The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) is a US federal metadata standard for encoding XML data. The NIEM includes almost 1500 classes and 5000 properties for things such as first name, last name, address, city, state, e-mail, phone numbers, GIS codes etc. The NIEM is a very mature system and includes extremely powerful tools for creating data exchanges between organizations. Syntactica uses NIEM as a basis for creating precise data exchange XML Schemas.