Marking up documents

Thu Aug 26 06:33:05 EDT 1999

I would be interested in finding out if anyone has tackled and solved the
problem of automatically marking up specific elements within a judgment (or
any electronic document) in such a language so as to enable automatic
importation into any database, or to enable information sharing between
organisations regardless of proprietary software.

For example, the Court's judgments (and those of many other courts) contain
standardised information such as Medium neutral Citation, Judge, Date of
Judgment, Place of Judgment, Cases considered, etc. 

HTML does this to a certain extent in that it marks the beginning and end
of specific elements within a document, eg. <body></body>, but is not
software independent, i.e. a web browser has to be used to interpret the
markup, and the tags which can be recognised are limited.  

I believe XML might be the answer. I have found plenty of sites which give
testimonials as to the use of XML in business when they are wanting to
transfer information from one system to another, or from their internal
system to the Internet. But have been unable to find any instance if it
being used in a library to mark up specific elements within standardised
documents so as to enable information sharing accross platforms and
software types. 

Any leads would be most welcome.

Sincerely

Marion Haworth
Systems and Projects Librarian
Web Site Administrator
Federal Court of Australia
http://www.fedcourt.gov.au