Designing for fidelity and usability in transforming legacy journal article XML to JATS

Taylor & Francis is working to develop a transformation process to convert a large archive of journal article files from an obsolete XML DTD to the current version of JATS. Two essential design principles guide the project: fidelity and usability. Fidelity guarantees preservation of all content from the original files, ensuring nothing is unknowingly lost. Usability ensures the transformation is easy to use in a variety of scenarios—from staff processing individual files to automated batch transformations of numerous files. Implementation required resolving multiple technical challenges inherent in the obsolete format while addressing complexities arising from strict design principles. To validate accuracy of the transformation, a specialized comparison tool was created that identifies content missing in the output XML compared to the input XML. The approach is analysis-driven, involving comparison of the two DTDs, and utilizing standard technologies including XQuery 3.1, XSLT 3.0, BaseX, Saxon, XSpec, and DTDAnalyzer.