Bridging O-telos and XML with XML schema: the authoring environment for KBS Adaptive Hyperbook

KBS Adaptive Hyperbook is a framework designed for modeling, organizing, and maintaining distributed hypermedia resources on the Web with the purpose of supporting Web-based distance education. Since the Hyperbook system is implemented based on a sophisticated meta modeling language (O-Telos), its authoring depends to a great extent on the Hyperbook developers instead of lecturers who have rich teaching experience but generally no knowledge of O-Telos and meta modeling. This has become a notable obstacle to enrich the content of existing Hyperbooks and further construct new Hyperbooks which are applicable to different specialties. In this paper we present a novel approach which can achieve schema-level transformation between O-Telos schema and W3C standard XML schema. By transforming Hyperbook data models, which are originally represented in O-Telos, into XML schemas, we can provide a standalone Hyperbook authoring environment which is able to directly utilize XML-schema-aware XML visual editors as a front-end GUI and enable lecturers to easily accomplish Hyperbook authoring.