For example, the site offers the MyPyramid Food Raw Data Set, which

…provides information on the total calories; calories from solid fats, added sugars, and alcohol (extras); MyPyramid food group and subgroup amounts; and saturated fat content of over 1,000 commonly eaten foods with corresponding commonly used portion amounts. This information is key to help consumers meet the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and manage their weight by understanding how many calories are consumed from “extras.” CNPP has created an interactive tool from this data set available on the web at MyFood-a-pedia.gov. A mobile version is coming soon to provide consumers with assistance on-the-go.

There are lots of great sets like that one on the site, all waiting to be turned into something useful by someone with the creativity and know-how.
I’m more interested in the inferences we might make by joining facts from several data sets: if we had data sets relating health, exercise frequency, and food preference to person, and a data set relating HCFS content to food type in addition to the MyPyramid Food Raw Data Set,
we could test the hypothesis that high-fructose corn syrup is more harmful per-calorie than sucrose.
Unfortunately, many of the available data sets represent the same objects with different terms, so producing mashups of this sort requires a little elbow grease: what’s called a client in one data set might be called a patient in another, so a human-written rule is required to relate the patient’s weight to the client’s bench press.
If every person were simply called a person instead, then a program could make the connections unaided.

I’ve just motivated the semantic web concept, which our most recent myseoblog, post discusses, and which DATA.GOV is working to realize (at least across its datasets). You don’t have to wait for that to arrive to do something interesting with the data, so head over to the site and see what’s available.

For the beginner: If you knew XML wasn’t a person (+1 to you!) but you don’t really know much beyond that, you should check out these sites.

XML for the absolute beginner

Mark Johnson wrote this tutorial on Javaworld long ago but the principles still apply.

A Beginners Guide to Creating and Displaying Your First XML Document.

DevGuru bypasses alot of the history of XML and jumps into the nitty gritty of XML structure and syntax before walking you through displaying your document.

For the advanced: So you already know all that and are grumpily mumbling at your monitor that this list is a waste of time? But wait! There’s more! These are just for you.

Advanced XML Programming

Cafe con Leche’s website seems somewhat dated but again, the information is still valid. And there’s alot of it. The tutorial is broken up into slides covering canonical XML, namespaces, and XPath.

Learn XML Schema

In this tutorial, Webucator covers everything from XML Schema basics to complex type elements and reusing schema elements.

From beginning to end: So you want a tutorial that’s gonna take you all the way, eh? From square one all the way to the top. I’ve got you covered there too.

W3Schools

You can’t make a list of web tutorials without including w3schools. With beginner and advanced sections as well as lessons on using XML within JavaScript w3schools has pretty much covered everything a beginner could need to know while breaching some of the more advanced subjects as well.

There you have it folks! Wait, what’s that? You say I’ve left one off? Au contraire mon frère! You’ve already found the sixth. In fact, you’re reading an article on it right now! Good for you. No just subscribe and we’ll just keep throwing tutorials at you until you become the Neo of XML and begin seeing all of you friends wrapped in attribute tags. And then you can go seek help too. See what I did there, folks? Full circle.

Embarrassing XML story? Share it with us in the comments.

Validation

My third grade class had a daily mad minute math worksheet to complete. Those who correctly answered all the math problems in a minute received a silver star on the chart. The one who finished first with all correct answers received a gold star. At the end of each week, the student with the most gold stars got to drink a soda at lunch. I didn’t validate my answers, and thus, I never got a soda. Likewise, our tendency to complete projects in a timely fashion often lead to cutting corners and/or prematurely accepting a project as complete. Although every good textbook says testing and validation are crucial elements of computer programming, these aspects, unfortunately, are often overlooked in the real world where testing and validation equal time, time equals money, etc. etc. However, if your project is generating any type of reusable data format, then validation should become absolutely mandatory. If your program creates improperly formated XML, then any requirement regarding exporting and/or sharing of data is most certainly not met.

There are some great validation tools for XML, so don’t be shy using them. Another, easier, test, is to simply export your data and try to import it using a standard library, like SimpleXML for PHP.

Common Sense Architecture

Not all data can be easily modeled. However, you should always take the extra time to find the best possible way to represent a given dataset. Failure to do so creates inadequacies when your modeled data has to be used elsewhere. Changes to your data structure? Don’t add an expansion to only the third floor of the building – there’ll be nothing underneath to support it! Instead, look for ways that make sense to expand. Sometimes, that means adding or rebuilding the foundation. Although lives are not always at risk based on how you may model a given dataset, attempt to treat it like lives are on the line. I can promise you that if I ever have to deal with your poorly modeled data, your life may, in fact, be on the line. If you’re building a structure for your family to live in, and it doesn’t seem safe to add or transform the structure, then don’t do it that way. All these analogies and metaphors dance around this: don’t be lazy. Use common sense when both initially modeling and making changes to your data from not only your perspective and the end user’s perspective, but also the perspective of anyone that might have to use the raw data model.

Jaquith ran into this problem when trying to normalize different states laws.

There are at least a few states that violate their standard state code structure. They might structure their code by dividing it into titles, each title into chapters, and each chapter into sections — except, sometimes, when chapters are called “articles.” Why do they do this? I have no idea.

Validate and use common sense, and you’ll save yourself, myself, and programmers around the world like Waldo a ton of headaches.

Comments

First, let’s discuss XML. XML (Extensible Markup Language) was endorsed by WC3 in early 1998, giving it the leg up on age. That age has given it the advantage of being widely utilized and accessible. Another plus for XML is it’s readability. A person with little to no understanding of data structures can look at an XML object and make safe assumptions as to it’s meaning. Finally, XML has multiple frameworks associated with it as well as being used by nearly 80% of the online APIs available.

Now onto JSON. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) began being used around 2001 by State Software. While JSON is harder to read for some, programmers have no issues as the format is similar to most language’s arrays. JSON also takes up considerably less space when considering larger amounts of data because it does not require the closing tags that XML does. JSON is also far easier to process in a program. XML requires nested each loops for a complex structure while JSON can accomplish the same with a simple for loop.

Perhaps, however, I am not the owl with the answer in this case but the crotchety old turtle telling you to look somewhere else. Like maybe the current trends in web development. As of mid 2011, 20% of the API’s were using strictly JSON. This may not seem that high but when you consider this is up from less than 5% only 3 years prior it’s impressive. The fact is that JSON is preferred by web developers and those who offer APIs want to cater to those web developers. But then again, we could be wrong. After all, we all know that owl was just a sugar crazed scammer.

Wolfram Alpha (also written WolframAlpha and Wolfram|Alpha) is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an on-line service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might. It was announced in March 2009 by British scientist Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on 15 May 2009.

At present, Alpha draws all its answers only from Wolfram-curated data sets.

The professional edition will be able to draw answers from user data sets (submitted as XML or other formats) also.

The other paper sways to the financial side of development, focusing on issues of cost surrounding the use of translation memory in language translations. In the end (spoiler alert) it explains why the user can save significant costs by utilizing their Vasont Content Management System’s Translation Savings Feature within technical communications groups as well as buyers of localization services.
Both papers are available to subscribers of Vasont’s website. If you’re not a subscriber you can register here for access.

<person>
  <name>Bob</name>
  <race>Caucasian</race>
  <race>Boston Marathon</race>

</person>

Utilizing namespaces, we can make each race have more meaning.

<person
xmlns:p="http://www.xmlpronews.com/person"
xmlns:r="http://www.xmlpronews.com/race">

  <p:name>Bob</name>
  <p:race>Caucasian</race>
  <r:race>Boston Marathon</race>
</person>

With XML Namespaces declared, a p: element represents something in the namespace described at http://www.xmlpronews.com/person. This file does not actually exist, but, if it did, would simply describe the available elements for the namespace. The W3C XML namespace for HTML4 can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4. There is no required format for these namespace pages.

According the the Corisecio website, the software “provides e.g. protection methods against SQL injection and XXE attacks and enables realization of scheme validation like WS-security standards.” Most people out there know about SQL injections, simply because there have been so many attacks of various types around the business sector lately. However, not many people know what an XXE attack actually is, and I am here to enlighten. According to SecuriTeam.com

“(An) XXE (Xml eXternal Entity) attack is an attack on an application that parses XML input from untrusted sources using incorrectly configured XML parser. The application may be coerced to open arbitrary files and/or TCP connections.”

Anybody that works in network administration or security can see how this could be extremely problematic. This offering is supposed to help protect against such attacks, and considering the fact that it is free, it may be worth a try. Some to the the listed features are:

• Easy to use, install, and administer
• An XML Firewall
• A Web Service Security Suite
• can be implement in a variety of infrastructures, including a virtual platform

If you are looking for something to cover another possible security hole that you may not have thought of, then go and check this out at http://secrt.corisecio.com/.

The researchers who found the problem, Juraj Somorovsky and Tibor Jager from Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, reported in their paper that “they were able to decrypt data by sending modified ciphertexts to the server, by gathering information from the received error messages.” They also see it a such an important issue because “It is employed in a large number of major web-based applications, ranging from business communications, e-commerce, and financial solutions.”

According to statements from Amazon.com officials, they were notified by the researchers through the W3C email list and they have already taken care of the problem in their systems. They are doing their best to ensure their customers that all of their data is still safe and is no longer in any danger from this threat. This would mostly be an issue for those using Amazons cloud computing services under their EC2 platform.

If you are directly affected by this, do your best to either fix the problem yourself or at least keep your eye out for updates on revisions of the XML standard. As more problems will most likely arise from this situation, there will likely be a great deal of effort to get the fix out there to the public.

Oxygen XML Editor – this is definitely one of the most popular and feature heavy of the XML editors out there. It is supported on all three of the major platforms, has an XSLT debugger, and also can be run as a plugin for Eclipse (which is hugely popular itself). It also has the ability to edit files other than XML and XSL files such as CSS and HTML files, which would be very handy, given the typical usage for XML files in web environments.

Liquid XML Editor – This editor is very similar to Oxygen featurewise, but this editor is only available for the Windows platform, which clearly limits a lot of its customer base. Regardless of that, if for some reason you are running Windows, then this may be the editor for you.

Serna-free – This is an open-source editor available on the Syntex website. This editor is also available for all of the major platforms, but unlike the other editors does not have the ability to edit not XML files. They also have an enterprise version available for download.

Go out and take a look at some of these editors and see which one works for you (all of them have free trial versions for download).

http://www.oxygenxml.com/

http://www.liquid-technologies.com/xml-editor.aspx

http://www.syntext.com/products/serna-free/