ICA (Integrated Chamelion Architecture), was developed at the Computer Science Department in Ohio State University [MOB90]. The system produces translators between different document encodings. Users specify an abstract syntax for the class of documents they wish to translate. Typically, this abstract syntax would be similar to a DTD used by SGML. Users then specify the conversion rules for mapping this abstract syntax to and from the concrete syntax used by different markup systems. Using this specification, the system generates translators that can convert documents from a specific concrete syntax to the abstract syntax and vice-versa.
The advantage of this approach is that it requires only [tex2html_wrap5898] translators to convert between documents encoded in [tex2html_wrap5900] different markup languages. Directly translating between the [tex2html_wrap5902] markup systems would require [tex2html_wrap5904] translators. The difficulty is that not all markup systems use the same model for the same class of documents. This means that the abstract syntax can capture only those features that are common to all [tex2html_wrap5906] markup systems. To give an example, one of the target systems might explicitly capture section numbers in the markup, while the other might compute them upon request.