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A GUI Knowledge Management Project (or at the simplest configuration, an xml editor or browser)

Component for Accessing XML based Objects (CAXO)

XML is an important foundation for defining structured information objects, or knowledge objects.

The means and possibilities in processing these objects are good, but few remedies are available for human interaction, -preserving their most valuable assets, their structure.

Information can be a poor carrier of knowledge, if it's most powerful characteristics, - structure, are removed.

If we consider knowledge as objects, how would such an object look like?

It requires a multiline tree structure of special text components, and the text components must be able to deal with structure.

To be able to deal with knowledge object, such as an OWL object, one needs control of what to display, and when. All information in an object can not be displayed, at all time.

In my opinion, the weakness in many xml-editing efforts is the lack of a GUI component handling both structure and advanced text at the same time.

The recognition of this problem has led to the caxo project. The project is originally a spin off from a knowledge management project.

the Project

CAXO is a java library, forming a JComponent. The component is ment to be directly implemented in any swing container, such as JScrollPane.

CAXO is a multiline and flexible (nodes expandable in size) tree component.

Any xml structure, parsed and given to CAXO, will be displayed with the readability the multiline widget gives, for both data centric or content centric nodes.

Example of a fictitious insurance claim report. Click on image for full view.

This shows the CAXO component displaying an imaginal insurance claim report (If I remember right, I lent the sample from an Oralce article once). All nodes expanded and configured to show the values of attributes id and values of attributes with prefix "xmlns" in red print. Cell editing is invoked on the last node. This last node shows an element marked up to a mixed content.

CAXO can form an excellent foundation for any applications in need of - displaying, - browsing, - editing or outlining xml content. CAXO responds to a configuration class, giving the programmer control of what to display and how to display it. Further, a set of Actions is available, among them "copy" "cut" "past" etc.

Example of the configuration of a Soap object. Click on image for full view.

To show this, I configured a sample soap object with different color setting for different namespaces, the envelope in light gray etc.

Click on image for full view.

CAXO is also able to verify a file against a XMLSchema, showing errors and options. The list of need to do is long, and the list of want to do, even longer.

Especially the text package needs to be redone. I am writing on a new package, and before that is done, the program is not safe. The text package also is the challenging part for the future development, in searching for superfluous object etc.