Tommie Usdin wrote today to say:
Balisage: The Markup Conference
2016 Program Now Available
http://www.balisage.net/2016/Program.htmlBalisage: where serious markup practitioners and theoreticians meet every August.
The 2016 program includes papers discussing reducing ambiguity in linked-open-data annotations, the visualization of XSLT execution patterns, automatic recognition of grant- and funding-related information in scientific papers, construction of an interactive interface to assist cybersecurity analysts, rules for graceful extension and customization of standard vocabularies, case studies of agile schema development, a report on XML encoding of subtitles for video, an extension of XPath to file systems, handling soft hyphens in historical texts, an automated validity checker for formatted pages, one no-angle-brackets editing interface for scholars of German family names and another for scholars of Roman legal history, and a survey of non-XML markup such as Markdown.
XML In, Web Out: A one-day Symposium on the sub rosa XML that powers an increasing number of websites will be held on Monday, August 1. http://balisage.net/XML-In-Web-Out/
If you are interested in open information, reusable documents, and vendor and application independence, then you need descriptive markup, and Balisage is the conference you should attend. Balisage brings together document architects, librarians, archivists, computer
scientists, XML practitioners, XSLT and XQuery programmers, implementers of XSLT and XQuery engines and other markup-related software, Topic-Map enthusiasts, semantic-Web evangelists, standards developers, academics, industrial researchers, government and NGO staff, industrial developers, practitioners, consultants, and the world’s greatest concentration of markup theorists. Some participants are busy designing replacements for XML while other still use SGML (and know why they do).Discussion is open, candid, and unashamedly technical.
Balisage 2016 Program: http://www.balisage.net/2016/Program.html
Symposium Program: http://balisage.net/XML-In-Web-Out/symposiumProgram.html
Even if you don’t eat RELAX grammars at snack time, put Balisage on your conference schedule. Even if a bit scruffy looking, the long time participants like new document/information problems or new ways of looking at old ones. Not to mention they, on occasion, learn something from newcomers as well.
It is a unique opportunity to meet the people who engineered the tools and specs that you use day to day.
Be forewarned that most of them have difficulty agreeing what controversial terms mean, like “document,” but that to one side, they are a good a crew as you are likely to meet.
Enjoy!