Expanded to 2 days! Many hands-on Exercises!

Introduction to Schematron

(2-day hands-on introduction to Schematron)

Schematron is a tool for finding things out about XML documents. With Schematron, users can identify all documents or portions of documents that have, or don’t have, a particular structure, value, or pattern. For example, a user can find all of the documents that lack author biographies; list all of the documents that have more than 25 figures; show any lists with fewer than 3 or more than 250 items. Schematron is used to check things that may be valid but that are often incorrect and to report on the status of a document or document collection.

Schematron is a rules-based validation/reporting language that works by making assertions about patterns found in XML documents and reporting back messages about the truth (or otherwise) of those assertions. There is no need to validate that the complete structure of a document is correct – just check one small constraint, or three. Schematron is small, powerful, and easy to learn. It can provide the best error/reporting messages in the world (you craft them for your specific situation). Even if you already use a schema language, Schematron can help for fast checking: pinpoint reporting of element and attributes presence, absence, values and value ranges, and co-constraints and other hard-to-crack edge cases.

Participants learn to use Schematron to identify both the presence and absence of data and patterns, and are introduced to some of the more complex things one can write with Schematron. In addition, participants learn enough XPath to get started with Schematron. While the examples in this class are text/publication based, the tool works equally well with highly structured data such as financial or business transactions.

This hands-on class can be taught on PC or Macintosh.

Prerequisites: Participants should have a basic knowledge of XML tagging. No prior Schematron, XPath, or XSLT knowledge is required, nor is a programming background needed. (Many editors, for example, find that Schematron is a valuable tool when they are working with XML documents.)