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<webpage id="presentation"> 

  <head>
	 <title>SDX-2 : Presentation</title>
	 <titleabbrev>Presentation</titleabbrev>
	 <author>
		<firstname>Martin</firstname>
		<surname>Sévigny</surname>
		<affiliation>
		  <orgname>AJLSM</orgname> 
		</affiliation>
	 </author>
	 <author>
		<firstname>Frédéric</firstname>
		<surname> Glorieux</surname>
		<affiliation>
		  <orgname>AJLSM</orgname> 
		</affiliation>
	 </author>
	 <revhistory>
		<revision>
		  <revnumber>1.0</revnumber> 
		  <date>2003-06-03</date> 
		</revision>
	 </revhistory>
  </head>

  <para>The SDX project reaches version 2. It still aims at offering a « System for Documents in XML » under the GPL licence (open source). What is SDX useful for ? What is the contribution of the new version (for those who already know the first one) ?</para>
  <itemizedlist>
	 <listitem>
		<para><emphasis>Document systems are very specific and have no large economic scope, why are they so expensive ?</emphasis></para>
		<para>With the 
		  <ulink url="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML standard</ulink> (and numerous related standards), document systems join general applications, many open source components are available.</para>
	 </listitem><listitem>
		<para><emphasis> XML documents are getting common, various partners can share them, is it possible to connect a search and display interface without copying orginal versions ?</emphasis></para>
		<para> SDX offers a search engine which can directly index URLs (<olink targetdocent="entrepot">repositories</olink>) ; it allows to define one or more indexing models (<olink targetdocent="base">document repositories</olink>), with relevance ordering and its own layer to display documents (without modifying orginal versions).</para>
	 </listitem>
	 <listitem>
		<para><emphasis>Our hosting provider offers a servlet engine, but with remote access only, including many restrictions. Is it necessary to call the Web administrator, each time something has to be modified ?</emphasis></para>
		<para> An 
		  <olink targetdocent="serveur">SDX</olink> server can be installed by performing few tasks : copy the archive in the servlets environment and restart the servlet engine once. To open an application, jsut do copy and paste.</para>
	 </listitem>
	 <listitem>
		<para><emphasis>An expensive licence has been bought for using a powerful database, what an open source software can be useful for ? Is it professional ?</emphasis> </para>
		<para>Except several widespread products, commercial software industry does not gather as many skills, testers and situations as an open source project. The SDX architecture coordinates components which are well-known for being among the most generic, and which provide services that would not generate profit in a commercial context (including support, documentation, advertising...). SDX can provide full-text search functionalities to a relational system (including multilingual syntax analysis, including configuration and thesaurus) ; it can gather scattered information in a single document for display and preservation purpose.</para>
	 </listitem>
  </itemizedlist>
  <para>This flexibility relies on an architecture and four key concepts: the<olink targetdocent="serveur"> SDX server</olink>, applications, document systems<olink targetdocent="base"></olink>, and repositories. This part of the documentation aims at defining those concepts.</para>

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