Structured Document Transformations

Greger Lindén: Structured Document Transformations. PhD Thesis, Report A-1997-2, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, June 1997. 122 pages. <http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/TR/A-1997/2>

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Abstract

We present two techniques for transforming structured documents. The first technique, called TT-grammars, is based on earlier work by Keller et al., and has been extended to fit structured documents. TT-grammars assure that the constructed transformation will produce only syntactically correct output even if the source and target representations may be specified with two unrelated context-free grammars. We present a transformation generator called ALCHEMIST which is based on TT-grammars. ALCHEMIST has been extended with semantic actions in order to make it possible to build full scale transformations. ALCHEMIST has been extensively used in a large software project for building a bridge between two development environments. The second technique is a tree transformation method especially targeted at SGML documents. The technique employs a transformation language called TranSID, which is a declarative, high-level tree transformation language. TranSID does not require the user to specify a grammar for the target representation but instead gives full programming power for arbitrary tree modifications. Both ALCHEMIST and TranSID are fully operational on UNIX platforms.

Index Terms

Categories and Subject Descriptors:
I.7.2 Text processing: Document preparation
D.3.4 Programming languages: Processors
F.4.2 Mathematical Logic and Formal Languages: Grammars and Other

General Terms: Algorithms, Design

Additional Key Words and Phrases: structured documents, tree transformation, SGML transformation