Date: Jun. 11, 2002
Link: http://ats.nist.gov/xsltoolbox/apex.html
Source Author or Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Manufacturing Systems Integration Division (MSID)

NIST Architectural Processor Employing XSLT (APEX) is a tool written in Extensible Style Language Transformations (XSLT) for transforming XML documents using architectural forms, or inheritable information architectures. Architectures are collections of rules that can be applied in the design of XML vocabularies. APEX implements a subset of Architectural Form Definition Requirements (AFDR).

An APEX style sheet provides a generic, non-validating architecture engine that accepts architecture attributes and style sheet parameters identifying the document's original architecture as input, and outputs an XML document with data and markup specified by another desired architecture (an architectural document). APEX is a tool for saving developers XSLT style sheet writing time when conversion or interoperation between differing documents and vocabularies is required.

APEX is available as part of the NIST XSLToolbox distribution, an open source XSLT toolkit placed in the public domain pursuant to title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code. A Java 2 Software Development Kit (SDK) and Jing are required for the Ant build files and APEX schema examples. ReportLab and the GNOME XML and XSLT libraries (with Python bindings) are required to run the APEX Python examples.