From Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at  Fri Mar  3 16:07:37 2000
From: Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at (Friedrich Leisch)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2000 17:07:37 +0100 (CET)
Subject: [Rd] StatDataML
Message-ID: <14527.58185.135296.986847@galadriel.ci.tuwien.ac.at>


Hi,

we have a first draft of R functions reading/writing data to XML files
including a rather general DTD ... which borrows heavily from the data
types of a certain programming language :-)

The basic idea is to create an XML standard for data exchange,
together with import/export functions for as many applications as
possible. We here will need R, Matlab & Octave for our research
program, but the idea is of course to create a general standard.

After looking in several other applications we think that all the data
types there can easily be represented using S constructs (i.e., arrays
and lists together with attributes) ... so why make life complicated
and invent something new.

Of course this only applies to the low-level representaion ... the
real thing will come next when one starts defining higher level
classes, this step we have avoided so far because one needs the
low-level things first to have something to play with.

A short description of the DTD and an R package with import/export
functions can be found at

	http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~leisch/R

(Modulo some bugs) R data objects can be saved/restored without loss
of information. We don't intend to cover functions or models yet.

All comments and ideas are appreciated! This is just a proposal and
anything can still be changed ... 

Best,
Fritz

PS: Almost all the work has been done by Torsten Hothorn, I'm just
writing the email ;-)

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                        Friedrich  Leisch 
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[Rd] StatDataML
Friedrich Leisch