Center in a Box

The Center for Document Engineering is one of about 100 "centers" on the UC Berkeley campus, most of which share the same conceptual model of a small academic research unit: a center has information components that describe its mission, people, initiatives, publications, events, news, and resources.

This common conceptual model has been encoded in an application called "Center in a Box" that consists of a set of XML schemas for these common components and associated XSLT transformations that automatically build the CDE web site from the XML documents containing the content. The transforms create valid XHTML and other formats, generating appropriate links and user interface components like tables of contents, links, and navigation aids. Center in a Box is implemented using the Apache Foundation's open-source Cocoon project.