Representing Information Throughout computing history information has been represented in various forms from basic text through rich-text formats, postscript to binary encoding. More recently information and the way it should be presented with its roots in publishing has found its way to the top in the form of markup languages. The markup language most people will be familiar with (perhaps unknowingly) is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). If you use a web browser, you’re using HTML and in future its successor Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) | Next Generation Network Services Neill Wilkinson Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBNs 0-471-48667-1 Hardback 0-470-84603-8 Electronic 8 Representing Information INTRODUCTION Throughout computing history information has been represented in various forms from basic text through rich-text formats postscript to binary encoding. More recently information and the way it should be presented with its roots in publishing has found its way to the top in the form of markup languages. The markup language most people will be familiar with perhaps unknowingly is Hypertext Markup Language HTML . If you use a web browser you re using HTML and in future its successor Extensible Hypertext Markup Language XHTML . The new kid on the block is Extensible Markup Language XML and it has found its way into almost every facet of telecommunications from provisioning services through to billing records and network management systems and even scripting languages for automated voice services. The long history of telecommunications as a real-time systems design problem has in the past necessitated optimisations in the use and encoding of information. As hardware has got faster and more sophisticated the need to encode information in protocols and databases in binary form is becoming less of an issue. The use of text encoding borrowed from the Internet school of design because of its simplicity and ease of understanding has become commonplace both in representing information in databases and in encoding protocol messages and remote procedure calls. It is this increase in capability that combined with the view that content means revenue is giving rise to the success of markup languages like those described in this chapter. In this chapter we explore X HTML XML and XML s children that have invaded the telecommunications network Voice Extensible Markup Language VoiceXML Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP Universal 100 REPRESENTING INFORMATION Description Discovery Integration UDDI Web .
