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- Explored possibility of auto-generating forms from xml through XForms technology
- Concluded that concrete XForms
 implementations not quite up to the job yet (June 2005)
- XForms works by taking a schema plus a corresponding xml 'instance' file to generate a forms document. The implementations so far (formsplayer, chiba, novell xforms) have difficulties with 'switch' and 'optional' elements in a schema - tcs contains both. Revisions to XForms 1.1 will solve some of these issues (ability to insert optional elements into xml instance) if this technology is pursued in the future.
- Produced TCS Data Sets for multiple taxonomy visualisation
- Kopersky Moss (14 * 10-10,000 taxa & species)
- MANIS (15 * 1,000-9,000 taxa & species)
- ITIS (7 * 200,000-250,000 taxa)
- ITIS TCS XML file huge for seven entire hierarchies - 650MB
- Unwieldy for large data sets?
- Takes 2.5 minutes to read in and parse (slightly faster with StAX v SAX parser) and uses 350MB+ memory
- Two pass parsing uses less memory but 4 minutes to parse
- Additions/Refinements to visualisation
- Ability to find uniquely named taxa out of a set of classifications
- Speeded up large tree comparisons - 2.5s to find classification structural changes
- Simple hash functions to reference names across classifications reduce memory footprint for sparser datasets without detriment to speed
- Added panel for visually comparing one particular name of interest across classifications
- add more later
- Attended TDWG 2005 meeting in St Petersburg
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