XPath Introduction

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XPath is a language for finding information in an XML document.
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XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML
document.
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What is XPath?
* XPath is a syntax for defining parts of an XML document
* XPath uses path expressions to navigate in XML documents
* XPath contains a library of standard functions
* XPath is a major element in XSLT( EXtensible Stylesheet Language).
* XPath is a W3C recommendation
 In XPath, there are seven kinds of nodes: element,
attribute, text, namespace, processing-instruction,
comment, and document (root) nodes.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-
8859-1"?>
<bookstore> <book>
<title lang="en">Harry
Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book> </bookstore>
Example of nodes in the XML document
above:

<bookstore> (document node)

<author>J K. Rowling</author> (element node)
lang="en" (attribute node)

Atomic values
Atomic values are nodes with no children or parent.
Example of atomic values:
J K. Rowling
"en"
 Items
Items are atomic values or nodes.
Relationship of Nodes

Parent
Each element and attribute has one parent.
In the following example; the book element is the parent of the title,
author, year, and price:
<book>
<title>Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
 Children

Element nodes may have zero, one or more children.

In the following example; the title, author, year, and
price elements are all children of the book element:

<book>
<title>Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
Siblings

Nodes that have the same parent.

In the following example; the title, author, year, and
price elements are all siblings:

<book>
<title>Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
Ancestors

A node's parent, parent's parent, etc.

In the following example; the ancestors of the title
element are the book element and the bookstore
element:
<bookstore>
<book>
<title>Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
</bookstore>
 Descendants

A node's children, children's children, etc.

In the following example; descendants of the bookstore
element are the book, title, author, year, and price
elements:
<bookstore>
<book>
<title>Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
</bookstore>
XPath uses path expressions to select nodes or node-sets in an XML document. The

node is selected by following a path or steps.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<bookstore>
<book>
<title lang="eng">Harry Potter</title>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
<book>
<title lang="eng">Learning XML</title>
<price>39.95</price>
</book>
</bookstore>
Selecting Nodes

XPath uses path expressions to select nodes in an XML document. The

node is selected by following a path or steps. The most useful path

expressions are listed below:

Examples

In the table below we have listed some path expressions and the result of the

expressions:
Predicates
Predicates are used to find a specific node or a node that contains a

specific value.
Predicates are always embedded in square brackets .
Selecting Unknown Nodes
XPath wildcards can be used to select unknown XML elements.

Selecting Several Paths

By using the | operator in an XPath expression you can

select several paths.
Xpath Axes

In the table, we have listed some path expressions and

the result of the expressions:
XPath Axes
An axis defines a node-set relative to the current node.
Location Path Expression
A location path can be absolute or relative.

An absolute location path starts with a slash ( / ) and a relative location path

does not. In both cases the location path consists of one or more steps, each

separated by a slash:
XPath Operators
Video, Audio and the Switch Element (SMIL)

Adding video and audio media to your presentation

is just as easy as adding images. The only
difference is that we use the <video> and <audio>
tags instead of <img> tags. These tags also take a
lot of the same attributes such as src, region, begin,
dur, etc. To add some audio, or more specifically a
RealMedia (.rm) file, we add this tag to our SMIL
document, <audio src="moo.rm" />. Below is what
our code should look like now.
●
When it comes to video, it's just like adding another
image.
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First, create a region to hold the video, then specify the
video with the <video> tag.
●
Include the location of the video file in the src attribute
of the <video> tag.
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With the <switch> tag, we can optimize the presentation
to fit the user's situation.
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All the content tags, i.e., <img>, <video>, <audio>,
<par>, <seq>, etc., have attributes that you use along
with <switch> such as system-screen-size, system-bitrate
and system-language. The SMIL parser then selects the
media that best suits the user's needs using these
attributes.
 What this does is chooses only one <audio> tag to use based on the user's bitrate. For example, if someone views this SMIL

presentation with a 28kbps modem, they'll get the "moo-28k.rm" file. On the other hand, if someone views it with something else not

specified, they'll get the "moo-other.rm" file since that has no "system-bitrate" attribute and is deemed the default.
Building and Indexing a Distributed Multimedia Presentation Archive
using SMIL

Generation of Metadata for Composite Mixed-Media

Digital Objects
 Metadata Processing Steps for Lecture Archive

illustrates the metadata processing and generation components for this

application.
Spatial Layout for a Simple SMIL Example
Replay Interface for a SMIL Presentation Lecture
 Presentation Capture
1. Filming a lecturer giving a PowerPoint
presentation;
2. Digitizing and encoding the video footage to
MPEG format (for analysis) and RealMedia
format (for streaming);
3. Analysing the digitized footage or logging data
to determine the times at which slide changes
occur;
4. Using the temporal information to generate a
SMIL presentation which integrates synchronized
digital video and PowerPoint slides with a timeline
for browsing and jumping directly to a particular
slide.
Overview of System Components and Process Flow
PresentationIndexer application.
Presentation Archive Search
Presentation Browse and Replay Interface