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 - GODDAGS and EARMARKS, Just Ducky And We Love It

Fabio Vitali both figuratively and literally gave an animated talk addressing the problem of overlapping markup and the problem of modeling documents as trees. The title of his presentation, Towards markup support for full GODDAGs and beyond: the EARMARK approach, does little to convey how entertaining he made the subject. Let's just say he didn't duck and run for cover.

The fact that Vitali used a song by my all-time favorite band, the Fab Four, certainly got my attention. And I love it! His case study was a karaoke application which he postulated poses interesting markup challenges. First, the selected song requires pronoun changes based on the gender of the singer. Lines are displayed twice for a one-line lookahead. Chord changes do not exactly match line changes. And the final challenge is embedded fun facts that popup at appropriate points in the song.

Vitali's paper discusses his approach to these challenges -- EARMARK (Extreme Annotational RDF Markup), an OWL ontology with RDF triples. See his Submitted Paper and also his EARMARK site. See also the earlier work by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen and Claus Huitfeldt, GODDAG: A Data Structure for Overlapping Hierarchies.

How do you say "Markup" in French?

Answer: Balisage (root: balise - beacon, buoy, sign). I'm strongly considering going to the 2009 Balisage: The Markup Conference in Montreal in August 11-14. For many years, this was known as "Extreme Markup", an XML geekfest (and I mean that in the nicest way) held yearly in Canada. This is an event the draws the greatest minds of the XML world to wax theoretical and practical. The lineup for 2009 is quite impressive. And how can you not want to visit historic, scenic Montreal? (List time I was there I was 10 years old and I have the pictures to prove it.) Now if only my passport renewal arrives in time....