August 11, 2009

Balisage 2009 - Opening Remarks and Sponsors


The Balisage 2009 Conference Committee -- B. Tommie Usdin (chair), Deborah A. Lapeyre, James David Mason, Steven R. Newcomb, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen -- opened the 4-day XML conference. One of the well-received announcement was their determination to make Balisage conference proceedings persistent. Unlike some other XML conferences which shall remain nameless (but not blameless), you’ll always be able to find all papers in the series. An ISBN has been assigned to each volume (2 per year), the entire series has an ISSN, and each individual paper has its own DOI (digital object identifier). How cool! Thank you, Mulberry Technologies!

The co-chairs acknowledged the two main sponsors: Mark Logic and the FLWOR Foundation. The FLWOR Foundation is dedicated to providing middleware and clients to simplify the use of XQuery. They have 3 open source projects under an Apache license:Zorba - XQuery processor, XQuery 1.1, update facility, scripting and REST extensions; XQIB (XQuery in the browser) is a browser plugin for Internet Explorer which allows execution of client-side XQuery to navigate and update the DOM; and an Eclipse plugin (XQVT?).

Of course, we all know Mark Logic because they've given us: MarkLogic Server, a native XML database that implements XQuery for the CRUD functionality with full-text and structured search; MarkLogic Application Services which includes Application Builder provides an intuitive, browser-based user interface for creating applications without writing XQuery code; and MarkMail.org, a public email search site built using Mark Logic App Builder which currently archives over 40 million searchable emails.

And Mark Logic is now also known for sponsoring a “Beer and Demo” (more about that later).

And let’s not forget those cool ergonomic pens donated by Patrick Russo (sp?). Don’t confuse them with a tuning fork or wishbone ;-)

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