An XML Interchange Format for Wiki Creole 1.0 [Technical Report]

Abstract: Wikis have become an important application on the web and in the enterprise, yet there are no interoperability standards between different wiki engines. We present the first complete XML representation format of Wiki Creole 1.0. Wiki Creole is a community standard for wiki markup, the language used to write wiki pages. This report presents the complete XML representation format using a validating XML schema. In addition we present XSLT definitions for transforming the XML representations to XHTML on the one hand and for transforming the XML representations to Wiki Creole markup on the other hand. Our work shows how using XML technologies we can make wiki interchange, wiki upgrading, and wiki conversion independent from a specific wiki engine implementation.

Reference: Martin Junghans, Dirk Riehle, Umit Yalcinalp. In ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, Volume 2007, Issue Winter (Winter 2007), Article No. 5. ACM Press, 2007.

Available as a PDF file.

Comments

14 responses to “An XML Interchange Format for Wiki Creole 1.0 [Technical Report]”

James Noble

2008-01-09

So this is interesting – but wouldn’t it be easier (quicker too) to just exchange Creoled-up JSON strings directly?

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Dirk Riehle

2008-01-09

Hey James, you are fast to have discovered this whole site remake 🙂 Thanks for the first comment on this blog!
As to your question: We were thinking about JSON too but stuck with XML (despite all the critique) hoping our standards expert at SAP Labs could guide us through a W3C process.
Still, you need to JSONify Creole, which is a big part we did with the XML spec. I think it would be straightforward (and sometimes simpler, think arrays) to turn the XML spec into JSON objects.

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Rodrigo Sampaio Primo

2009-06-03

Hi Dirk, I’m working on a MediaWiki to TikiWiki importer as part of my Google Summer of Code 2009 project (http://dev.tikiwiki.org/gsoc2009rodrigo). I plan to use PEAR::Text_Wiki which might help in conversions between TikiWiki and Wiki Creole as there is a recent PEAR::Text_Wiki_Creole package.
I have interest in the XML Interchange Format but I don’t I will be able to implement support for this format both for TikiWiki and for MediaWiki in this project unfortunately.
I’m writing because I would like to know the status of the project and if there are some working implementations of it. Thanks, Rodrigo.

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Dirk Riehle

2009-06-07

Hi Rodrigo, Martin Junghans made his implementations available but I’m not sure right now where. Maybe you can ask him directly? –Dirk

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Martin

2009-06-09

Please have a look at the sources at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikicreole. If you need further advice, please contact me.
Martin

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Wiki to XML using Ant « PrayogShala

2009-07-17

[…] Dirk Riehle. They did research on this subject. As a result, they created an EBNF grammar and an XML interchange format (Creole […]

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Dave Pawson

2009-09-02

There appears to be no files at sourceforge site for this?
Did it ever get off the ground?
TIA DaveP

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Martin

2009-09-05

Hi Dave,
the code is located at http://wikicreole.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/wikicreole/XmlCreator/. Just check out the project from VCS (it’s CVS).
Cheers, Martin

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Zoe Blade

2009-10-06

Hi!
This looks like a fantastic format. I’m starting to get into Creole as the closest I can find to a standard Wiki format, and an XML version of it is a great idea. I just wish I’d thought to look for them before wasting time making up my own lesser formats first.
I can’t seem to find a license for this XML format. Is it freely available for anyone to use, or do you intend to license it out?
Thanks,
Zoe.

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Dirk Riehle

2009-10-06

Hi Zoe,
files are licensed under the AGPL, as shown on SourceForge. Unfortunately, this particular code base is not under active development at present; I do hope to restart it though under a new umbrella, my new job, that is http://osr.cs.fau.de
Cheers,
Dirk

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Zoe Blade

2009-10-06

Wow, thanks for the quick reply! That’s OK about the development, I was going to write my own code anyway (I need it to run in PHP, not Java). It’s just nice to know there are existing standards for the formats themselves that I can work with.
If I get my code working, I’ll be sure to publicly release it under a similarly liberal license.
Thanks again,
Zoe.

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Zoe Blade

2009-10-30

Hi again!
Thanks for the help. I’ve now tentatively released the work-in-progress of my Creole conversion class. It’s available at http://bytenoise.co.uk/creole.txt to anyone who’s interested in using it.
It’s very basic at the moment, not implementing the whole spec, but it’s a start. I’ve released it under the AGPL — I hadn’t realised such a license exited until you pointed it out to me, so thanks for that information too!
Zoe.

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Zoe Blade

2010-04-20

Hi!
Sorry to keep pestering you like this, but is there any chance you could suggest CreoleXML tags to support Creole’s additions such as indentation for quoting, superscripted text and subscripted text? I’m working on getting various historical books translated into Creole format, then from there to CreoleXML and finally from that to a variety of other formats, but in order to proceed I need to either find or create a version of CreoleXML that supports these three additions. Any support in the way of an updated CreoleXML spec, or permission/blessings to make my own, would be much appreciated.
Thank you,
Zoe.
PS My parser is coming on nicely so far and is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpcreole/ should you wish to use it.

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Dirk Riehle

2010-04-22

Hi Zoe, we are not actively working on it any longer, so feel free to go ahead and create your own extension! –Dirk

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