21.360 XML-related queries

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 360.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
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                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 08:00:13 +0000
         From: Norman Gray <norman_at_astro.gla.ac.uk>
         Subject: Re: 21.357 XML-related queries

Greetings.

Susan Brown said:

>The Orlando project built its own system years ago to support the
>collaborative writing and editing of its documents. It archives,
>provides version control, tracks workflow according to the
>responsibility tags within the documents, allows communications
>between team members about particular documents, enables various
>reports to be generated, provides access to project documentation,
>etc., but most of these things are discrete tasks. We need before
>long to rebuild the system and are interested in developing a new
>environment that would integrate some of the key activities more
>effectively to simply our workflow processes.

I don't know of any systems which work specifically with XML
documents, but the requirements you have are probably almost
completely compatible with those of a general software development
support system -- the phrase to google is 'issue tracking' software.

There are a number of those available. Sourceforge is one of the
best known, but there are a number listed at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Comparison_of_Free_Software_Hosting_Facilities>. Those are
hosting services rather than examples of hosting software, but if for
some reason you have a need to have the software running on your own
machines, several of them make their software available for that
purpose (the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourceforge> article
refers in particular to Savane and GForge as free projects). There
are plenty more systems than are listed here.

Based on my own experience, I can say that Sourceforge (the service,
and thus implicitly the software) is perfectly functional but feels a
little clunky, and Google Code has been functional to the limited
extent I've used it so far, and as smooth as Google things usually are.

The other system I know of is Bugzilla (functional, but still
clunky). Jira <http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/> is used by
Apache, so it manifestly scales well.

Good luck,

Norman

-- 
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Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester, UK