ICA (Integrated Chameleon Architecture)

ICA offers a suite of tools for creating translators for documents to and from constrained subsets of instances of SGML Document Type Definitions (DTDs), such as HTML. It can be used to build a gateway environment that translates documents produced with desktop applications into the general markup scheme, or that translates the general markup scheme back into the native desktop publishing scheme.

URLs:

Integrated Chameleon Architecture

An Announcement of ICA version 1.6

Chameleon ftp site

ICA is available by anonymous ftp.

Print Resources:

• The Integrated Chameleon Architecture: Translating Documents with Style. Sandra Mamrak, Conleth S. O'Connell and Julie Barnes. Prentice Hall. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 1994. (ISBN 0-13-056418-4)

Detail:

ICA creates translators by producing an intermediate general markup scheme. The process requires three distinct phases:

• General Description Phrase - the development of a grammar and markup scheme describing the intermediate document
• Building Phase - developing various toolsets: --a retagger application for the source document which specifies mappings to replace source tags --an insert tagger which makes explicit implicit source document tags, and --toolsets for specific-to-general and general-to-specific translators to reorder the tags.
• Use Phase - --applying the retagging applications to the source document to produce an explicitly marked-up document --inputting that document to a specific-to-general translator to obtain an intermediate general marked-up document --inputting that document to a general-to-specific translator to produce the target document. ICA is an environment for UNIX machines that uses X Windows as a graphical interface.