Printing Structured Text without Stylesheets?

As more and more XML documents start to appear, e.g. on the WWW, the users face a new problem: opposite to HTML tags, XML tags do not tell the semantics of a structure element. This means that if a document does not come with layout, e.g. XSL or CSS, specifications, it is not easy to say how the document should be formatted for presentation in print or on screen. In this paper we describe a tool and a process with which a document without any stylesheets or styling information can be automatically transformed to be viewed with different target media (paper, WWW browser, WAP phone, etc.). Our approach is based on DTD generalization and element mapping, and transformation and styling with XSLT. We give hands-on examples of the automatic transformation process pipeline from the original stylesheetless document to the transformed result document with media-specific styling, and show that the approach works in practice. Prof. Helena Ahonen-Myka, Ph.D. Mika Klemettinen, Ph.D. Barbara Heikkinen, and M.Sc. Oskari Heinonen have their backgrounds in structured documents and data mining. AhonenMyka got her Ph.D. in 1996 with a thesis titled “Generating grammars for structured documents using grammatical inference methods”. Klemettinen obtained his Ph.D. in 1999; his thesis was about knowledge discovery in telecom area. Heikkinen got her Ph.D. in 2000 with a thesis titled “Generalization of Document Structures and Document Assembly”. Heinonen is finishing his Ph.D. studies. All the authors except Heikkinen work currently at the Department of Computer Science at the University ofHelsinki; Heikkinen is with the Nokia Research