IBM Alphaworks has posted a product called the "Virtual XML Garden," to provide XML query facilities for various input formats including ZIP files, IMS databases, relational databases, filesystems, and more. The goal is to provide a single facility to produce XML from multiple sources.

From the problem description:

More and more structured data is converted into XML documents, either for transmission and processing that follow various standards such as the Web service standards, or for combination with "semi-structured" document data in XHTML and similar formats. Sometimes the original structured data is converted in its original position; sometimes it is converted "on the fly." Both approaches pose problems: If the original data is converted, then legacy applications depending on the old format must be rewritten. Converting data on the fly, on the other hand, imposes a significant performance penalty because the standard XML format requires significant overhead for generating or parsing XML character sequences.

Virtual XML Garden works through the use of adapters for each input type. Each adapter is responsible for conversion of the input into a workable XML representation.

This article makes reference to "the forthcoming Data Format Definition Language (DFDL) standard". Does anyone know if this is from a standards body or where I can find more information?

Thanks,

Andy Grove
CodeFutures Software

A bit of concentrated Googling eventually yielded the answer (only 7 google hits for "DFDL specification"). It's a draft standard from the Global Grid Forum.

The
DFDL specification is still a highly moving target. You can get some idea of what it does by reading last year's primer, http://www.ggf.org/Meetings/GGF11/Documents/DFDL_Primer_v2.pdf. A new primer is being written but is not yet available.
Our "Virtual XML Garden" release contains a prototype implementation which is documented in a separate document, included in the release as samples/dfdl/DFDL.html. I will be giving a tutorial on DFDL at the upcoming XML 2005, based on this prototype, for those who want to actually code some converters from structured formats to XML.

You could read a (really) short introduction to DFDL in the FAQ : http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/virtualxml/faq#06
Here is the description :
"DFDL stands for the Data Format Description Language and is a proposed standard being developed by a similarly-named working group of the Global Grid Forum. DFDL-related parts of the release are in the samples/dfdl directory."