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

The two most well-known models for representing XMLprogrammatically (to enable efficient document navigation) are the DocumentObject Model (DOM) and the Simple API for XML (SAX). By using thesemodels, the hierarchical tree of data in the XML document can be parsedrecursively to retrieve data, data can be accessed by tag name, and a list of nodes(children of an element) can be retrieved. All of these object-oriented capabilitiescan also be reversed to accomplish population of XML documents with new data.Thus, the object models can be used not only for deciphering XML documents butalso to build them.The SDF2XML application uses the DOM model to load the entire XMLdocument into memory giving the flexibility to access any section of thedocument at any point in the application. To access a given section of the XMLdocument, the DOM parsing tools are used to instantiate objects that point to thedesired section and extract the information content by means of the object’smethods and properties. The XML objects that need to be represented by theDOM model are the elements, attributes, and nodes.In summary, the main advantage of an XML document is that it can betreated as a collection of objects and navigated as such instead of having to usetraditional and tedious text parsing methods. Also, the self-describing nature ofthe data in XML provides the data context and understanding needed forapplication integration exercises like the one attempted hereby.157