Importing XML into Lotus Notes?

Question

We are looking to switch to the LegalDocML XML standard for our documents. We've been looking at various XML databases such as OracleXML DB, BaseX and others

However, I've noticed that Lotus Notes seems to have the capability to support XML ingesting - and we have Lotus Notes in-house at the moment.

My question/s are:

1. Can I ingest XML and have Lotus actually use it (vs simply storing the XML) and make it properly searchable?
2. Any pointers to where I can find the "How"?

Answer 1

20+ years ago, there was a thriving market of Lotus business partners serving the legal market, so it's certainly possible that someone out there, somewhere, has some ready-made application templates that work with LegalDocML -- but I'm not aware of any, so for the purposes of this answer I'm assuming that nobody has a specific product built for this niche.

Yes, Lotus/IBM/HCL Notes can ingest XML and make it properly searchable.

But there is no magic button that you can push and say "Here is a bunch of XML written to some schema. Go ahead and make me a Notes application that can represent all the data from that schema and ingest all the XML into that application."

You'll have to make use of the XML parsing tools that are available (e.g., in LotusScript or Java) and write code to do the parsing and ingestion. And before you do that, you're going to have to design the Notes application database (NSF file) with forms and views to organize the data that you will parse out of the XML. And before you do that, you're going to need to analyze the XML schema and decide basic things llke:

• Is there a one-to-one correspondence between XML files and Notes documents?
• If there are different types of XML documents, or different sections within each XML document that you want to split into individual Notes documents, what are the relationships between these documents, and do they fit neatly with Notes' built-in parent/child document relationship?
• Which XML items do you want to be ingested as discrete Notes items, which ones do you want to be ingested into list items or into multiple parallel list items, and which ones do you want ingested as XML strings that happen to be stored in Notes items or NotesRichText items?
• What additional features do you want in your applicaiton in addition to faithful storage and indexing of the ingested XML data? (E.g., what is the lifecycle of the ingested data, what are the security, archvinging, auditing, and versioning requirements, and does it get re-exported back to XML? Etc.