A concise XML binding framework facilitates practical object-oriented document engineering

Semantic web researchers tend to assume that XML Schema and OWL-S are the correct means for representing the types, structure, and semantics of XML data used for documents and interchange between programs and services. These technologies separate information representation from implementation. The separation may seem like a benefit, because it is platform-agnostic. The problem is that the separation interferes with writing correct programs for practical document engineering, because it violates a primary principle of object-oriented programming: integration of data structures and algorithms. We develop an XML binding framework that connects Java object declarations with serialized XML representation. A basis of the framework is a metalanguage, embedded in Java object and field declarations, designed to be particularly concise, to facilitate the authoring and maintenance of programs that generate and manipulate XML documents. The framework serves as the foundation for a layered software architecture that includes meta-metadata descriptions for multimedia information extraction, modeling, and visualization; Lightweight Semantic Distributed Computing Services; interaction logging services; and a user studies framework.