See here.

XML on the Web: An Open Discussion

Balisage is pleased to host a meeting of W3Quebec as a Nocturne at Balisage 2008. The Nocturne/W3Quebec meeting will be held in the Mont Blanc room of the Hotel Europa on August 12, from 19:00 to 20:30. The meeting will be an open discussion on the use of XML in web development, covering both some mistakes of the past and good applications which have approached the original W3C vision of the web.

The Balisage pre-conference “International Symposium on Versioning XML Vocabularies and Systems” has included time in the program for a “Speakers Corner”. During this time all symposium attendees are invited to give short presentations.

Attendees are encouraged to prepare their 5-minute presentations in advance, to organize their presentations to make good use of limited time, and to prepare visuals in HTML to accompany their presentations if desired.

Papers at the Balisage 2008 conference will discuss a wide variety of topics. I have just received a draft of the topic list for the Balisage proceedings, and see that it is divided into Actions, Concepts, and Specifications, and into specifics with those categories.

The most frequent Actions are: transforming, Querying, Publishing, Parsing, and Linking.

The most frequent Concepts include: Modeling, Interoperability, Semantic Web, Concurrent Markup, and Knowledge Representation.

The most frequently mentioned Specifications are: Topic Maps, XSD/W3c Schema, XML, TexMECS, SAX, RDF, and DOM.

Balisage IS an XML Conference. That is, it is a conference about what people are doing with XML, what they want to do with XML, what XML is, and what they want XML to be.

Calling it a "Markup Conference" is silly, and makes the event harder for interested people to find. The only markup that matters in 2008 is XML, and people are using XML for virtually everything they want to markup up.

A lot of people like the Extreme ... er ... Balisage conference by HATE the hotel. Simply put, it is NOT a business hotel. It is not comfortable. It doesn't have room service or a decent restaurant. The rooms are TINY.

Montreal is a wonderful city with many good hotels. So, for people who want to attend Balisage but who prefer to stay in a hotel designed for business travelers I have a few suggestions. They all cost more than the Europa, but this is a business trip and there is no need to stay at a funky Best Western on an expense-report. "

Members of Balisage co-sponsor organizations (and employees of members) are eligible for significant discounts on Balisage registration. (See the Balisage Registration page for details.)

Co-sponsors include: DC XML Users Group, Philadelphia XML Users Group, XML UK, The Text Encoding Initiative, OASIS, and W3C.

Full-time academics (students and faculty) and government employees are also eligible for discount registration.

Balisage is a peer reviewed conference. And not "lightly" peer reviewed; reviewers read anonymized full papers and provide detailed advice to the authors on how the papers can be improved. The Balisage Peer Review page describes the peer review process.

If you want to be a peer reviewer for Balisage please fill out the Peer Review Application.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR
Balisage: The Markup Conference
August 12 - 15, 2008
(workshop: August 11, 2008)

Montréal in August has always been the place and time for serious markup geeks to meet, and this year there's an all-new conference for them.