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Elkera personnel have over 10 years experience converting narrative content to XML markup from either print or word processor formats. Elkera's experience covers both automated and manual conversion projects. Elkera's holistic methodology ensures that very large amounts of data can be converted efficiently to measurable quality standards in a way that supports all aspects of a customer's dynamic enterprise publishing project.
Using Elkera's data conversion services, you can be confident that the data conversion project will be completed to your required quality standards on time and within budget.
There are four critical factors in a data conversion project:
- design and completeness of the DTD or schema;
- complexity and consistency of the source data;
- the contractor's expertise and understanding of the schema and the source documents; and
- desired quality for text capture (if electronic sources are not available) and XML markup.
Before data conversion can begin, the schema must match the data. It is possible to make minor adjustments to the schema during the conversion but if changes affect data already converted, the project will be disrupted as that data is re-worked. Elkera's methodology ensures that a comprehensive data analysis is carried out before conversion so that disruptive changes to the schema should not be required during the conversion project.
Most legacy data lacks the strict and consistent structure desired in XML data. The choice is to either rectify the existing data or create a very loose schema that may cause excessive complexity in the rest of the system. This choice is very important if converted data is to be updated from time to time after conversion and cannot be quarantined from new data. Excessively loose schema make authoring new content difficult and they impose high costs on development of rendering applications. Ideally, this issue should be addressed as part of schema design. Elkera assists customers to determine a practical balance between data rectification and acceptable schema design to remove unnecessary complexity from the system.
It is relatively easy to transform documents to XML so they are valid against a given schema. It is much more difficult to ensure that the components in the source documents are consistently mapped to the correct elements defined by the schema, not just valid elements. This is called “semantic accuracy”. Unless the data and schema are very simple, a strategy must be developed to educate conversion personnel how to apply the schema to the documents to be converted.
Elkera ensures that a detailed markup specification is prepared that will guide program developers, keyboard operators and data testers to consistently and correctly apply the schema to the data during conversion. The markup specification is the key to achieving the desired level of semantic accuracy as well as to the measurement of the result.
Based on the markup specification, Elkera develops a quality inspection plan using ISO 2859 to define the contract quality standards for the project that suit the customer's system and budgetary needs. This inspection scheme also defines a cost effective way to measure the overall quality of the converted data. Statistically determined random samples are taken from converted data and all documents in those samples are inspected for conformance to the specification. Separate quality standards can be defined for and applied to text capture as well as XML markup.
Elkera's holistic methodology ensures that the conversion process will be completed to agreed quality standards, on time and on budget. The converted data will provide a reliable input into all XML processing and publishing systems.
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