TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose– XML has spread beyond the computer science fields and reached other areas such as, e‐commerce, identification, information storage, instant messaging and others. Data communicated over these domains are now mainly based on XML. Thus, allowing non‐expert programmers to manipulate and control their XML data is essential. The purpose of this paper is to present an XA2C framework intended for both non‐expert and expert programmers and provide them with means to write/draw their XML data manipulation operations.Design/methodology/approach– In the literature, this issue has been dealt with from two perspectives: first, XML alteration/adaptation techniques requiring a certain level of expertise to be implemented and are not unified yet; and second, Mashups, which are not formally defined yet and are not specific to XML data, and XML‐oriented visual languages are based on structural transformations and data extraction mainly and do not allow XML textual data manipulations. The paper discusses existing approaches and the XA2C framework is presented.Findings– The framework is defined based on the dataflow paradigm (visual diagram compositions) while taking advantage of both Mashups and XML‐oriented visual languages by defining a well‐founded modular architecture and an XML‐oriented visual functional composition language based on colored petri nets allowing functional compositions. The framework takes advantage of existing XML alteration/adaptation techniques by defining them as XML‐oriented manipulation functions. A prototype called XA2C is developed and presented here for testing and validating the authors' approach.Originality/value– This paper presents a detailed description of an XML‐oriented manipulation framework implementing the XML‐oriented composition definition language.
VL  - 7
IS  - 3
SN  - 1744-0084
DO  - 10.1108/17440081111165884
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/17440081111165884
AU  - Tekli Gilbert
AU  - Chbeir Richard
AU  - Fayolle Jacques
PY  - 2011
Y1  - 2011/01/01
TI  - XA2C: a framework for manipulating XML data
T2  - International Journal of Web Information Systems
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 240
EP  - 269
Y2  - 2024/04/24
ER  -