Balisage 2010 - XML Conference - Schedule Posted!

"Balisage: The Markup Conference" (http://www.balisage.net) is an annual peer-reviewed XML conference: how to create markup; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; presentation and accessibility; making systems that make markup dance (or dance faster to a different tune in a smaller space).

Come to lovely Montreal, Canada from August 3rd to 6th for four action-packed days of angle brackets! Here’s a baker dozen (or so) sampling from the much larger list of Balisage 2010 presentations:

• gXML, a new approach to cultivating XML trees in Java
• Java integration of XQuery — an information unit oriented approach
• Reverse modeling for domain-driven engineering of publishing technology
• Managing semantics in XML vocabularies
• XML pipeline processing in the browser
• Where XForms meets the glass: Bridging between data and interaction design
• Schema component paths for schema analysis
• A streaming XSLT processor
• Multi-structured documents and the emergence of annotations vocabularies
• Processing arbitrarily large XML using a persistent DOM
• Automatic upconversion using XProc
• Scripting documents with XQuery
• XQuery design patterns
• Parallel processing and your XML data

Want to travel on the weekend so you can talk about angle brackets for an extra day? Then register for the pre-conference symposium on August 2nd, “XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term Preservation of XML”.

Schedule At-a-Glance: http://www.balisage.net/2010/At-A-Glance.html

Detailed schedule with descriptions: http://www.balisage.net/2010/Program.html

XML for the Long Haul: http://www.balisage.net/longhaul/index.html

Tower of Modern Babel Contest - Chance to win an Apple 15" (i5) MacBook Pro, Apple MacBook Air or USD $2000: http://www.balisage.net/contest.html

Sponsors include: Mark Logic, oXygen XML Editor, and the FLWOR Foundation. Co-sponsors include: W3C, OASIS, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, XML Guild, TEI Encoding Initiative, Washington Area SGML/XML Users Group, Philadelphia XML Users Group, and many more. Balisage 2010 is a production of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a Washington area XML and SGML consultancy.

Balisage 2009 - Pull, Push, Stream and Scream

On August 12, Mike Kay (Saxonica) presented two back-to-back topics related to XML/XSLT pipeline processing optimization. The first talk, You pull, I’ll push: On the polarity of pipelines, [Submitted Paper] compared and contrasted the control flow in the pipeline, which can run either with the data flow ("push") or against it ("pull"). That is, in “push”, control flow and data flow in the same direction, whereas in “pull”, control flow and data flow in opposite directions.In the main loop, data is pulled on input and then pushed. Kay discussed other combinations, such as fully streamable case of pull, pull, control, push, push pipelines. In branch and merge pipelines, pull is needed for multiple inputs, whereas push is needed for multiple outputs. Schema validation in Saxon is written in push style because it forks. This led Kay to say there is no clear winner between push and pull; each is appropriate in different situations.

Mike Kay’s paper discusses various combinations and approaches such as the other “JSP” (Jackson Structured Programming), the concept of inversion, and coroutines, which involve multiple stacks in a single thread; 2 programs are written as if they each own the control loop. Kay relates these concepts to XSLT processors and concludes:

As the usage of XML increases and more and more users find themselves applying languages like XSLT and XQuery to multi-gigabyte datasets, a technology that can remove the problems caused by pipeline polarity clashes has great potential.

[Will add his second talk here when I'm not so sleepy.]