Custom XML editor frameworks

Based on the Oxygen XML Editor, we can create custom authoring environments serving specific XML formats dedicated to research areas. Such environments have a visual editor where XML tags are hidden and context-sensitive menus help the users to remain XML schema compliant while editing. It is also possible to render an XML template as a form with text inputs and select boxes. Menu items can call scripts or remote operations to further enrich the XML.

The edited XML can be a laboratory or experiment documentation, or any other type of document where a structured format can improve the FAIRness of the data.

As a working example, we maintain an editor framework for digital humanities researchers, where they can create and process critical editions of literature. Scholars need not know the rules of the XML schema, even a very basic knowledge of XML is sufficient for them to be able to produce well-formed XML outputs.

We use the TEI XML schema, and metadata for the writing can be filled as a form, while the text is easily enrichable with comments. One type of commenting activity is entity linking to namespaces (persons, geonames, etc.), for which we use custom extensions with remote service invocation and user dialogs. Another type of buttons call local scripts to perform operations on the XML, such as the extraction of all named entities into a CSV spreadsheet.