[5 August 2009]

This week I’m busy trying to wrap things up before heading to Montréal next week for Balisage. Songs from South Pacific keep running through my head, starting of course with “Bali Ha’i” (to which Enrique is working on a contrafacture).

I had meant to post periodically over the summer about papers I’m particularly looking forward to hearing, in the interest of reminding people about the conference and trying to encourage attendance. I only managed one or two, but it seems I needn’t feel guilty, after all. The conference chair, Tommie Usdin of Mulberry Technologies, tells me that we have now pre-registered more people for Balisage 2009 than we have had at any previous Balisage.

So even without my reminding people about what is on the program, people are coming to the conference anyway. Good! But I can’t resist mentioning here: Fabio Vitali and his colleagues have a really super idea for encoding overlapping structures by using RDF (which automatically means that we can try using SPARQL to query such documents). The continuing work on XML representations of overlap in Bielefeld and Lyon continues to bear fruit: Maik Stührenberg and Daniel Jettka of Bielefeld are talking about XStandoff, the successor to the Sekimo General Format (SGF) developed earlier in Bielefeld, while Pierre Edouard Portier and Sylvie Calabretto of Lyon are talking about the problem of constructing documents using formats like Lyon’s MultiX. And Desmond Schmidt of Queensland University of Technology is coming, to talk about his work on overlapping structures in multi-versioned documents.

Norm Walsh and Michael Kay are both talking about pipelines in XML processing. Michael is also chairing a full-day symposium on Monday about efficient processing of XML. (Why did no one from the EXI effort offer a paper?!) Kurt Cagle is talking about XML and linked data (that would be the rebranding of the Semantic Web).

And there’s a lot more. See the program for details.

So this year Balisage will be bigger than ever before.

I hope to see you in Montréal next week!