<AJBConsulting>

At the core of our business lies this simple equation...

Power = ( Data × Transformation ) Insight \text{Power} = (\text{Data} \times \text{Transformation})^{\text{Insight}}

The IT Power Equation

Empower Your Business with Actionable Insights

Enable AI to Enable You

...and...

Ensure There's NO GARBAGE IN leading to garbage out!

Power

Yep. We live in a world with AI.

And there's a need now, more than ever, for clean, organized, conformant, and reliable data. Data that HUMANS understand, as well as machines. Because humans will NEVER not be a fundamental part of the equation.

Machines will provide the insights now, you say? But who teaches those machines? Who provides the data that serves the learning of those machines? And what happens when AI learns from itself? We're seeing the results of that right now, and they aren't pretty.

Humans never in the loop? NO THANK YOU!

XML was originally designed to make electronic publishing for multiple media quite a bit easier than it had been during the days when SGML reigned supreme. It can be debated whether too many cooks ultimately spoiled the broth or no. But what can't be debated is the use and usefulness of this data format over the years beyond the publishing realm -- a data format which is as reasonably readable by humans as it is by machines.

To quote the excellent, if "opinionated", history of XML as seen by Bob DuCharme:

A Google search for “json replace xml” gets over 5,000 hits. (That’s with the quotes around the search terms, to make Google search for the exact phrase. Without the quotes, it gets almost five million hits.) I like JSON, and see how it can replace many of the uses of XML that have been around since the dot com boom days, but anyone who thinks it can completely replace XML doesn’t understand what XML was designed for. Documents with inline markup (or, in XML geekspeak, “mixed content”—for example, the way the HTML a element can be in the middle of a sentence within a p element) would theoretically work fine in JSON, but in practice, it would be too easy to screw it up when editing it with a text editor by accidentally adding or removing a single curly brace. Tools to hide the syntax behind a more intuitive interface may address the issue, but dependence on such tools was something that the original XML designers wanted to avoid. And frankly, when I picture a complex prose document stored in JSON, I hear the ghost of Microsoft’s RTF dragging chains through the attic.

(from "A brief, opinionated history of XML")

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Principles

Our Principles

We at AJB Consulting pride ourselves on our adherence to the following three core principles regarding the use of XML and its associated technologies. These involve the construction and handling of XML data, the XSD that describes it, and the XSL that transforms it.

Principle

Data Is King

Actionable Insights Demand Clean, Organized, Conformant Data!

If the above statement is accurate, then why would you treat royalty as a mere subject of your enterprise's 'kingdom'? Aside from database care and feeding, how one develops and utilizes their markup's data model is of paramount import to mission success.

XML is a data-encoding markup standard which accounts for both human and machine readability. Too often, the balance is unduly shifted toward one or the other. This imbalance is most likely due to the "tunnel vision" of the entity or entities that dominate the data-model creation and/or maintenance process. The beauty of XML, however, is that you shouldn't have to compromise! Well-crafted XML should meet the needs of all reasonable invested parties, achieve balance, and enable the job to get done.

If you and your business find yourselves in a situation where you need to restore that balance, then you need us - professionals with experience in all of the components that go into XML schema (XSD) creation and refactoring, such as element vs. attribute usage, complex-content definition, namespace creation/elimination and maintenance, value constraint, business rule creation and enforcement, consolidation of declarations and merging within schema sets, and more.

Principle

The Right Tools for the Right Jobs

Process XML Data With The Toolset It Was Designed For!

All too often, we've seen companies struggle when dealing with XML data using the latest buzzword technology, or limiting themselves under their developers' prejudices. Use the right tools, the established tools, to do the job - and the people that know how to use them. That's us!

Once you have a well-crafted data model - where do you go from there? What products do you produce from your data, and how? XML relies on XSL Transformation stylesheets (XSLT) to be transformed into... well, pretty much anything you can think of. XML which conforms to another schema? Text? Word documents? PDFs? Excel files? HTML? Even graphics? Yes. With accessibility from numerous programming languages, and the power of XPath node selection and processing alongside it, XSLT is often a core component of publishing pipelines and complex data structure/mapping translation schemes. XSLT is indeed pretty powerful on its own, but combine it with Java extensions, and well-structured, well-populated data, and the sky is truly the limit. The XML tech set has expanded to the point of being able to do much of what most programming languages can, only it was conceived to view "data as king" from the start!

Is your data NOT in XML? Have you ever wondered if it could be, and all of the benefits that could entail? No-SQL databases such as Exist and MarkLogic can be used to avoid all the pitfalls of a relational database while maximizing the power of the XML infoset and all its well-established tools.

Of course, this doesn't just happen all by itself. Again, you need experts in data transformation that know how to turn your precious data into the products you and your customers need to thrive. This not only involves knowledge of the above technologies, but open-source and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) packages to drive this process, such as XSLT processors, PDF transformation engines (involving either XSL-FO or CSS-based styling), XML pipelining (XProc) technologies, NoSQL database storage, and more. You need us.

Principle

Better Author Experiences Mean Better Output

Your Authors Ought Already Know Their Jobs.
Empower Their Tools To As Well!

In between data architecture and final output sit the authors. Assuming a sharp, talented crew behind your content, catering to their needs and wants usually means improving the final product(s). You'll need professionals experienced in best-in-breed XML authoring suites, such as oXygen XML Editor, to get the job done.

Is AI having a huge impact on authoring? Absolutely. Is it going to eliminate the author? Not likely. The human touch will always be required to appeal best to the human customer. Tools are to be used by humans, not subsume them. That being the case, they often have to be taught, customized, etc. to meet the needs of their human users.

An extremely flexible tool, oXygen allows enormous customization of the author experience through various programmatic and GUI-based means. Simplify the interface to focus them on what's truly important, or expand functionality to allow them to get creative or control particulars. Gonna fly just using a text editor? XML was built to handle that case, but in today's world of complex data models, good luck with that. You need tools that don't lock you into one vendor when it comes to the actual data, but which nevertheless can drive the creation and maintenance of that data with their own customized as well as native capabilities. Whatever the case may be, again - you need US.

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Background

About Us

Anthony J. Bufort (Owner)

Owner Anthony J. (Tony) Bufort is a well-rounded senior software engineer with 20+ years' experience in software development and XML-based publishing for small, mid, and large-sized companies. XML technologies and Java are his career specialties. Ever reluctant to embrace the word "expert," he believes in constant learning and growth, and strives to do work he knows and enjoys well, while continuing to evolve. Tony is well-versed in a wide array of XML technologies involving the creation, parsing, manipulation, storage, and querying of XML. He's dealt with XML as raw data, publishing content, and a transport protocol. Having worked with document specifications in the legislative, IT, medical, and aerospace domains, among others, Tony has a proven track record of adapting to client needs. He possesses a wealth of experience in creating and executing data transforms, and with various PDF publishing engines, as well as with the foibles of XSL-FO and area trees / intermediate output for those engines. He has also engineered author-experience customizations for oXygen and other environments.


His LinkedIn profile is available for review at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonybufort/

Honesty and Integrity Checkmark

A professional opinion that you can trust, because our honest assessment and feedback will always be offered. We'll never misrepresent a situation - whether for our benefit, or for yours. That integrity is the necessary soil out of which great things can grow.

Reasonable Rates Checkmark

We will always endeavor to strike a fair balance between your needs, desires, and resources and ours. Unscrupulous consultants leverage client ignorance for their own gain. Not here! We wish to educate and empower. Estimates and rates will never be egregiously inflated. The final goal is to be able to give our best for your best, and develop a final product that we can both be proud of.

Experience You Can Trust Checkmark

With work under our belt for companies large and small, such as Boeing, IBM, United Airlines, JetBlue, Honeywell, and many others, we can honestly say that we've "been around." The results? Check out our "Successes" page for a sample of our most prominent achievements to date.

Core Certifications Checkmark

Java
XML
Javascript
HTML
Cloud Fundamentals

Partnerships Checkmark

AJB Consulting is proud to be a Consulting Partner
and authorized re-seller of oXygen XML Editor.

oXygen XML Editor

We've used many XML editing tools, and we're not sure why anyone would want to use anything else. That having been said, we'll work with you no matter what. :)

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Achievements

Several Success Stories

Here is a sampling of our development success stories:

Star for Accomplishment

Created a custom-coded Transform Map for a major ServiceNow Marketplace cybersecurity provider to import OSCAL XML into back-end security-control and other tables via JSON API / parsing, custom field mappings to XML, and Glide DB API. Prototyped a next-generation XRX architecture and implementation plan involving automated generation of XForms from OSCAL data, REST services to handle transport, and XQuery to manipulate a MarkLogic backend. Created a ServiceNow MID server on VMWare with Windows Server 2022 running MarkLogic and Tomcat for the purpose. Engineered a solution to seamlessly insert OSCAL XML into FedRAMP System Security Plan (SSP) Microsoft Word document templates via XSLT 3.1, Java, and Office Open XML (OOXML).

Star for Accomplishment

Directed the architecture of, maintained, developed, and updated internal and customer-facing toolsets, both desktop and web-based, for XSLT, Java, and Python-based publication systems and data analysis / conversion tools for a major aerospace contractor. Handled S1000D-related military contracts involving data conversion and publishing for government and corporate clients/projects. Worked daily with XSLT 3.0, Saxon 9.9x, Antenna House Formatter 7.2, Java JDK 1.8 / 15.x, Python 3.x, Oxygen XML Editor 25.x, Eclipse IDE (2022-xx), S1000D 4.2, Adobe Pro, CGM, SVG, and other core tools, technologies, and specifications. Transformed old Interleaf LISP code to XML for conversion by XSL to Common LISP, to be run using Steel Bank Common LISP. Debugged conversions in preparation for new project.

Star for Accomplishment

Marked up various famous legislative documents in Akoma Ntoso (AKN) legal markup language for an upcoming legislative editor version. Wrote XSLT transforms and Java extensions to support such ongoing efforts. Developed ODF-to-AKN round-trip conversion and storage facilities for editor.

Star for Accomplishment

Customized multi-hundred-page DocBook 5 technical publications (title-page, table-of-contents, cross-reference, header/footer, list, table, and numerous other customizations deviating from native DocBook output). Developed XSL transforms for DITA documents of Fortune 500 clients into Angular-backed HTML 5 forms and PDF using DITA-OT.

Star for Accomplishment

Developed Spring Boot web-service-based XSLT validation system to insure XSD and business-rule conformance for American Association of Medical Colleges "curriculum inventory" submissions via a proprietary API.

Star for Accomplishment

Performed XSL-FO publication formatting via XSLT for S1000D XML data transformations to PDF for major commercial airlines such as United Airlines, JetBlue, and Honeywell.

Star for Accomplishment

Engineered, for the commercial division of a major aerospace company, S1000D-compliant maintenance-training document assemblies, transformations, and storage using XML technologies (XSLT, XSL-FO, Antenna House Formatter, XProc, XQuery, xDB), native JavaScript, and Java within a customized "authoring, configuration, and transformation utilities and services" application context.

Star for Accomplishment

Developed Oxygen XML authoring interface customizations using XSD schemas, CSS, Java, and third-party APIs to provide hundreds of aerospace authors with properly-constrained editing capabilities and clean, consistent views of rendered XML data akin to the intended final product.

Star for Accomplishment

Developed XSL stylesheets for a one-time, batch conversion of SGML-based data from a major aerospace company's system into S1000D XML for eventual PDF formatting.

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Rates

Policies

Per-hour rates are flexible, and calculated after clear discussion of the expectations, schedule, and budget of the client. Per-project flat fees, while less frequent, are also possible.

As work is typically remote, requests for on-site presence entail additional considerations for travel and accommodation expenses.

No project will be accepted whose payout terms are greater than net 30 days, with net 15 or less being the expected arrangement.

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Resources

Community Resources

W3C's XML-Related Specs and Tutorials

Saxon XSLT Processor

Schema Supplementation (e.g. business-rules validation)

oXygen XML Editor (and related software)

XML Pipeline (XProc) Engines

PDF Engines

XML to Java Data Binding

DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture)

DocBook

Native XML Databases (Open-Source)

Databases in General

XSLT and XQuery Unit Testing

Web Security and XML

Binary XML (a.k.a. "EXI")

Generation of Synthetic XML Documents

Semantic HTML

IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) Resources

The Latest XML News

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Downloads

AJBC Project Downloads

ajb-xslt-cloud-extensions.jar

Extensions for the Saxon XSL processor allowing XSL programmers to conveniently perform cloud-based operations, via both functions and tag-based instructions.

The first cut of this library focuses on exposing a number of cloud storage operations across four major providers - Azure, AWS, Google, and IBM. There's also a smattering of other functionality, such as concerning speech synthesis and AI analytics. Future releases will expose more functionality as we go.

It's not yet ready for prime time, and I want to provide ample documentation and guidance on getting ramped up with each of the providers as well as, of course, documenting and providing usage examples for the extensions themselves.

STAY TUNED!


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Contact

We'd love to hear from you!

Please reach out to us via email at:

ajbufort@ajbconsulting.us

describing your self / organization / project
and needs,
and we will get back with you promptly.

Thank you for thinking of us!

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