About the Teaching Assistant

Name:Lesiley John
Email: ljohn@mscs.mu.edu
Office Hours: Mon & Wed 2.00pm - 4.20pm and by appointment
Venue:Rm 357
Note: If you can't find the TA in Rm 357, you will
find her in Lab 301 or Lab 310.

I have added a new section to the site called "postscripts". These are things I think of after the lecture that might have helped your understanding, often based (as today) on the questions you ask. It is hard to guess what people will or will not catch right away, so this will often relate to something that seemed hard to get across.

In the past I just thought "I'll add that to the lecture the next time I teach the class". To which my response should have been "Hah!!".

Right now there is no index page, just look in that directory and see if there is a postscript. And I might edit these pages as I have more thoughts.

About the Course

This is a general seminar style course to discuss topics in information representation.

This particular offering will focus on XML, but in other semesters there may be a different focus, although it will always intend to cover the subject of information representation somewhat generally.

The interesting thing about XML representations is that XML may be used to represent specific data, or to specify program construction, or to specify the configuration of an information service, or to represent Universal Resource Identifiers, or you_name_it.

The power of an XML schema is that you can customize a grammar for any of these purposes.

Our text

We will use a textbook, XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition, by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means, published by O'Reilly.

Code examples from the book are available at Examples from XML in a Nutshell.

You are welcome to download these examples from that site. Modified examples will be provided with instructions for running them on our systems as needed in examples by Chapter..

As those of you who know (about) me are aware, I will not slavishly follow the text. Rather, it will be a reference for you. We will consider many topics not specifically covered in that text, and you can refer to the text for other things you need to know that are not covered in class.

It is a carefully written and accurate book, and thus one you can keep with you and use as a guide. The book and I will not disagree on topics, merely present different perspectives. In most cases I will give more detail than the book, and examples that go a bit deeper than those in the book.

Here is a set of slides on Processing XML in Java, written by one of the authors of our text.