XPointers
XPointers, when combined with XLinkS, are a way to link out of the current document to an external document fragment. Importantly, you can specify which parts of the external documents you want to retrieve.
Currently, in BioXML, this is only done by ID. The xpointer spec uses XPath to specify any node in an xml document. THe problem is that there are no good implementations of XPointer/XLink software. Therfore, bioxml compliant datasources should just implement the smallest possible subset of the xpointer language - the id.
an xpointer lookslike this :
href="http://www.xmldatasource.com/documentOfInterest.xml#xpointer(id('XmlElementId'))"
The first part, of course, is just a uri The part after the # is the xpointer. Note that it asks for an id of 'XmlElementId'. All an applicatuion has to do to is return the element (and its children) that corresponds to that id.
For a good Xlink/XPointer overview, see:
http://www.brics.dk/~amoeller/XML/linking.html
Related pages: Unclassified?
|