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Converting a NEXRAD Rainfall Map into a Flood Inundation Map by ...

Converting a NEXRAD Rainfall Map into a Flood Inundation Map by ...

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data structures delivered <strong>by</strong> every system. One alternative that has been adoptedas a standard for data exchange between independent applications is XML(Extended Markup Language), a language that temporarily holds data for movingit between heterogeneous applications and platforms <strong>by</strong> clearly “tagging” its datacontent. To overcome the distributed and heterogeneous character of the datasets,federated database management systems (DBMS) constituting seamlessapproaches to data exchange have been proposed (Raman et al., 2002). In general,the data transfer between applications must be as decoupled from the applicationsas possible while still maintaining context. XML provides the means foraccomplishing this (Harold and Means, 2001).XML is a self-describing mark-up language that describes hierarchicaltrees of data. The description in XML is done through HTML type of tags andthey describe the data that they delimit as opposed to describing the look of thedata they delimit. Thus, the describing tags hold the metadata keywords that tellapplications the meaning of the data and not the visual representation of it. Thetags can contain multiple levels of metadata descriptors in the form of node namesand attributes.Another key characteristic of XML is its extensibility character. Thismeans that unlike HTML, which has a limited number of predefined tagsdescribing the look of the data (bold, italic, table, and so on), XML supportscustom tags. So, if the data in XML is related to water resources, the engineermay create specific tags for that type of information. Figure 4.36 shows an155

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