Section 5.2.6.5.  StarDOM

A convenience of well designed object representations is that effective transformation between different data representations may be possible. The StarDOM package (Linge et al., 1999) demonstrates a transformation from STAR Files to an XML representation, where the tree structure of a STAR File as interpreted in the starlib view above is mapped to a document object model (DOM; W3C, 2004). This approach is similar to Jumbo, mentioned above in Section 5.2.6.2.

A demonstration of StarDOM is the transformation of the complete set of NMR data files at BioMagResBank to XML. The resultant files can then be interrogated using the XQL query language (Robie et al., 1998). In this example implementation, the target XML document type definition (DTD) includes a small number of XML elements matching the STAR objects global and data block, save frame, list, data item, data name and data value. Particular data names are recorded as values of the <NAME> element. The authors of the StarDOM package are considering an extension in which named data items map directly to separate XML elements; the goal is to develop an NMR-specific DTD that is isomorphous to the emerging NMRStar data dictionary.