Recent Projects

Working with Cambridgeshire County Council to provide XML consultancy and development services to Project Nomad (a national project looking at mobile computing for Local Authorities). Tasks include:

• Requirements study, data analysis, XML schema and XSLT development, XML consultancy to external suppliers. Streams include:
• Cemetery Health and Safety
• Street Scene
• CAT Single Assessment Tool.

Provided data analysis and XML schema development for environmental health information to the ENCORE national project.

Provided consultancy, XML schema and XSLT 2 development services to a company developing websites from XML content stores.

Customise existing training course and perform training in XML, XPath, XSLT and XSL-FO for a development/media company who provide services and products to Local Government. Provided independent review of current product set and provided consultancy related to new versions of their products.

Provided data analysis and XML schema development for trading standards information to the eTrading Standards national project.

In 2003 and 2004 I worked on the Planning And Regulatory Services On-Line (PARSOL) national project. This project is sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) and was undertaken by various local authorities (I worked with West Dorset District Council). The project was designed to enable electronic access and submission of information to planning and licensing information. I have provided the XML consultancy for the project and have been worked in two project streams, with tasks including:

Stream 3 - Technical and Infrastructure

• Consultancy and development of all core XML schemas for the project (including Planning Enforcement, Monitoring and all Licensing/Regulatory schemas compliant with existing Governement standards and schema such as BS7666 and the Government Data Standards Catalogue)
• Consultancy on E-GIF compliancy, use of XML in other streams solutions, advise on standards and XML development solutions
• Review and update of Planning Inspectorate PINS schemas
• Attend Parsol meetings and provide informal training in the use of XML technologies.
• Attend meetings of the Government Schema Guidelines group at the Office of the E-Envoy.

Stream 4 - Regulation and Licensing

• Work with systems architect/developer to establish requirements, design and develop a technical solution for on-line licensing portal (using XML Schemas, Web Services, .Net, and SQL Server)
• Develop licensing schemas (see above) along with application and user profile schemas for licensing system
• Develop XSLT stylesheets to display licence information
• Develop XSLT stylesheets to convert initial licence application information for population of renewal applications
• Demonstrate solution and present solution at various licensing functions

At various times during 2003, I worked with a company who develop a database product for the recording of drug use information for Drug Treatment Agencies. My tasks included:

• the analysis of the available data in the product database;
• interpretation and analysis of complex Government standard schema and Govtalk components;
• meetings with the Government system developer and Department of Health officials
• mapping of the data to a Government standard schema;
• design of a flexible technical solution to support initial and on-going interfaces;
• development of a data export schema for the database product; and
• development of a configurable COM conversion component to perform the mapping (using VB, SAX, DOM, and XSLT)

I used my knowledge of Govtalk schema standards and general experience of data modelling and schema development to highlight issues in the schema and devised a highly configurable XSLT-based solution for the mapping of the data. This solution can process large volumes of data using SAX or smaller expert files using DOM according to the configurable parameters passed to the component.

I worked with a manufacturer of medical systems to:

• define requirements for information capture during their systems design and development process;
• investigate the feasibility of using XML and XML tools to capture the information and trace relationships in the information;
• create a functional specification detailing the requirements; and
• develop, install and document a customised XML editing suite, PDF creation through XSL-FO and link reporting system integrating XML, MS-Excel and web reports through XSLT.

This system includes the following components:

• an XML schema to structure the information (based on the Docbook DTD);
• a highly customised XML editor (XMetaL) to allow staff to generate content and links without expert XML knowledge);
• a COM component to
  • allow the creation and conversion of graphic objects;
  • to ZIP all of the required material (XML and graphics) into a self-contained XML file suitable for archive;
  • to provided link and cross-reference management;
• a custom link reporter build using VB, Excel, XSLT, and Internet Explorer; and
• an XSL-FO stylesheet and integration of an XSL-FO processor to allow the creation of high-quality PDF or paper output.

The initial system has been installed and is currently being assessed with a view to being rolled-out in the coming months.

I developed and performed a training course for a group of developers, consultants and project managers specifically designed to ensure that the company had a good overall understanding of XML technologies.

The course included presentation and hands-on sections covering the history, technical specification, business benefits and example usage of the following subjects:

• XML;
• XPath;
• XSchema;
• Namespace; and
• XSLT.

The course was presented using PowerPoint and the hands-on training utilised XML Spy.

Over the course of six months I provided consultancy and training with the hospital technical staff to support the development of an Intranet drug guide and dispensary (known as a formulary). This work included:

During 2003, I continued my work with the trust providing an XSL-FO training course and further XML consultancy.

In 2001 and the first half of 2002, I worked within the Criminal Justice System designing an interface between two of the major Criminal Justice Organisations. Tasks for this project included:

• providing technical input into the system requirements for a new nation-wide IT system;
• reviewing the bidder's proposals, attending the bidder's presentations, judging bids;
• performing business analysis documenting the use and exchange of data in the organisation;
• creation of a high-level data model;
• writing business and technical briefs for all levels of the organisation;
• performing detailed document analysis to produce interface specifications; and
• developing an extensive XML Schema with accompanying XML examples and XSLT files.

I joined a development team working on a website supporting a TV channel a couple of weeks before launch. The site had been developed using an outsourced development team using Interwoven TeamSite, Java, and Oracle. I developed new XSLT stylesheets, fixed problems with existing stylesheets, and developed Interwoven templates to aid the content management.

EMCL worked for a major systems integrator developing an Internet Travel Agency. Our role within the project was that of XML Technical Architect with responsibility for:

• contributing to the overall system architecture design in order to use XML as a data exchange format between different software components;
• performing document analysis on various data feeds and DTDs for travel information from various content suppliers, recommending suppliers based on XML quality, and documenting the impact of the XML on system requirments (support for document chunking, link support etc.);
• supporting the content management consulatnt by providing XML expertise and reviewing product choice;
• performing document/process analysis on the XML e-commerce messaging interfaces provided by product providers (e.g. car hire, package holidays); and
• developed a working prototype for the generation, processing and user interface generation of the e-commerce data using ASP, a custom Visual Basic COM component, server XMLHTTP, DOM manipulation and XSLT.

This customer provides document authoring, translation and associated services to commercial publishers. EMCL designed and developed a demonstrator prototype to show the principle of delivering XML technical documentation held in SQL Server to a web browser via a web server.

A follow-up project provided a JavaScript/DHTML user interface to a database of labour time information. The user interface allowed searching and browsing of information in the database along with the ability to select tasks to be added to a "shopping basket" with the total time being updated as tasks are selected.

In the latest project for this customer, EMCL developed a custom web browser front-end to an object-orientated content management system adding bespoke functionality for Internet upload and download of XML and binary information. This project also involved the integration of commercial translation and XML editing solutions. Completed documents were automatically transferred to a SQL Server web delivery system. This project required the development of server and client side COM components and utilised Visual Basic, ASP/Microsoft Remote Scripting, JavaScript, VB Script, SQL, XMLHTTP, DOM and XSLT technologies. All content (both user interface files and documents held in the system) were stored in Unicode format for latin and non-latin languages such as English, German and Korean.

EMCL performed consultancy for an IT branch of a London firm of corporate and media lawyers. The consultancy involved the development of a technical specification document that describes how a complex document system could be developed, including low-level technical descriptions of XML and linking techniques that could be used to solve difficult technical problems.

A leading Intranet system provider required a review of their XML approach and advice on the selection and use of XSL processor.

EMCL worked on a series of projects with the UK’s largest "official" document publisher. Tasks included:

• Business analysis – creating a document looking at the way they produce and manage content;
• System Design – creating a design for a document management system using XML, SQL Server, VB COM components, XMetaL and Internet Information Server
• Project management – overseeing this development
• Development – developing XML DOM code, XSLs, DTDs, and integrating the XMetaL editor
• Stylesheet Development – controlling the configuration and display of documents in the editor package and on the intranet and internet
• Training – provided training in XSLT, XmetaL development and configuration, and training in using the system and developing the system.

EMCL also helped develop two XML driven web sites producing XSL stylesheets and providing conversion programs.

These projects are still live and in use.