Transmorpher

Motivation

Structured document transformations will take a very important place in many activities including formatting documents to various formats (HTML, PDF, Open EBook...) and adapting them for various devices (printers, phones, E-Book readers, personal digital assistants...). This requires an environment able to take in charge the whole transformation process.

Transmorpher is an environment for defining and processing complex transformation flows. It is partly based on the transformation language XSLT recommended by the "World-wide web consortium" (W3C). XSLT is overly complex for simple transformations (such as renaming tags) and too simple for composing transformations (such as applying a transformation until it does not apply anymore). It enables the description of individual transformations but does not support transformation combination and complex data flows.
Transmorpher takes as input a transformation flow described in XML. It is portable, open to other transformation engines and yet sufficient for expressing complex flows of transformations.

Transmorpher is an environment for processing generic transformations on XML documents. It aims at complementing XSLT in order to:

• describe easily simple transformations (removing elements, replacing tag and attribute names, concatenating documents...);
• allowing regular expression transformations on the content;
• composing transformations by linking their (multiple) output to input;
• iterating transformations, sometimes until saturation (closure operation);
• integrating external transformations.

Transmorpher is a first Java implementation of these concepts, taking advantage of existing XML parsers and XSLT processors. This site is devoted to the development of Transmorpher. Another site will soon be devoted to the diffusion of stable versions.

Partners

Transmorpher is a joint development of the Exmo action of INRIA Rhône-Alpes and Fluxmedia.