Samir Kakar* and Chris Curtis** * Aptara Inc ** Formerly of Wolters Kluwer London Play (40min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

Maximizing return from a comprehensive technology like XML requires multiple strategies and tools. The further upstream that XML can be created, the greater the leverage and the lower the cost. We look at platforms and tools that allow subject matter experts to create in XML and how to manage the hand-off to all subsequent steps in an XML environment. Additionally, the global nature of modern production requires tools that track schedule and process from inception to delivery in final formats. This can be accomplished by a suite of control applications, or by choosing a publishing platform.

Kevin Cohn*, Aviva Weinstein** * Atypon ** Oxford University Press Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

The speakers will give complementary presentation. Mr. Cohn discuss how recent developments in applications place an even greater emphasis on XML-first workflows, which the largest publishers already have and the smaller ones are moving towards.Content can and should be presented differently in print, traditional digital (desktop and laptop), and mobile formats. A given researcher can and will consume the same piece of content in more than one of the above formats, each in a different way. Ms Weinstein will draw upon the OUP experience. They have found that by developing their resources in XML they are able to benefit customers by enhancing the search experience away from single titles to multiple resources. Once in a resource it is quite easy to access others relating to the same search topic (in some instances unsubscribed content is made available for free). The ability to discover greater chunks of materials is exciting – all too often researchers are pushed into silos of content.

Norman Walsh MarkLogic Play (56min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

This presentation will explore the current state of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language through a combination of slides and live demos. Particular attention will be paid to demonstrating pipelines that are, or could be, useful to solve real world problems.

George Cristian Bina oXygenXML Play (43min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

A live demo of oXygen presented by two of the oXygen team members. The demo will cover some of the important XML authoring and development features like:

• visual authoring (DocBook, DITA, etc.)
• schema development
• XSLT development and debugging
• working with XQuery and XML Databases

Questions are welcome at any time!

Priscilla Walmsley Datypic Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The FunctX XQuery/XSLT 2.0 function library is a set of reusable functions for XQuery 1.0 and XSLT 2.0. The project itself is an open source application and framework for developers to create function libraries. This talk will present an overview of FunctX from the perspectives of using the library and as an example of how one would build reusable XSLT and XQuery modules.

Michael Kay Saxonica Play (60min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The XML Schema (XSD) specification from W3C is a paradox: it is one of the most heavily criticised specifications to come out of the organisation, but at the same time it has been widely adopted and implemented, and it can be said to have met all its design objectives.

For some time the responsible working group has been developing a new version, XSD 1.1, which is starting to get close to the finish line. Many of the difficulties with the specification (such as its immense complexity) will still be there, but some of the criticisms, notably those concerned with the limited functionality of the spec, are met head on with some powerful new features. This talk will give a quick overview of what’s new, while concentrating in particular on the way in which Assertions are likely to change the way in which XSD is used. Assertions, borrowed from Schematron, supplement the ability to define constraints using grammar and datatypes by a general predicate mechanism based on XPath. Already implemented in Saxon, they offer far more than the obvious ability to define boolean constraints: the talk will explain how they can be used as a powerful mechanism for tailoring and specializing schemas for use in different environments within an industry community.

The speaker, Dr Michael Kay, is founder of Saxonica Limited which develops the popular Saxon XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema engine. He is a member of the W3C working groups for all three languages, and author of XSLT 2.0 Programmer’s Reference, the definitive Wrox guide to the language, recently republished in a fourth edition.

Václav Trojan Syntea Play (43min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The paper describes Xdefinition 2.1 as an integral instrument for the design and development of projects with XML objects. In our development of Xdefinitions we concentrated on their application in the process of XML documents throughout the life cycle of the information system creation. This cycle typically includes discussions and negotiations with partners, analysts and implementators. We emphasized comprehensibility for all participants of the individual stages of IS formation as well as the binding character. The description of XML objects structures by means of Xdefinitions is easy to understand not only for informatics experts but also for a wider spectrum of participants who inevitably take part in the project implementation. By the binding character we mean the usability of the description for machine processing (description of data structures includes also processing code). Compared to the previous versions the Xdefinitions 2.1 thus allow also to define links of the objects to different situations in the course of their processing.

Petr Nálevka Play (23min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

This article proposes a set of powerful XML technologies (e. g. DocBook, SVG…) to automate authoring of large, detailed and highly visual documentation which would be difficult and error prone to reproduce manually. The author further proposes best-practices for XML authoring and introduces a simple yet powerful framework which supports tasks typically related to document publishing and integration of information from various sources.

Rather than building a complex theoretical background this article focuses on being very practical. It demonstrates the use of various technologies on a case study taken from the networking industry.

Alex Brown adjb.net Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

At the 2006 Extreme Markup conference in Montreal I presented a paper outlining a method of XML processing based around “frozen streams” which seemed to promise better memory usage and execution time for common XML processing operations.

This paper briefly revisits the theory, presents the results of implementing it, enumerates the lessons learned and suggests new ways forward.

Vojtěch Toman EMC Corporation Play (28min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

XProc, or the XML Pipeline Language, has every potential to become one of the most useful new XML technologies around. The language has recently become a W3C Candidate Recommendation and is gathering growing interest in the XML community, both from the users and implementers.

Following the progress of the specification, and the evolution of the language to its present form, XProc has been successfully deployed in a dynamic content delivery platform, where it has quickly proved its strengths and established itself as the primary technology for XML data manipulations.

In this paper, we will briefly discuss the design principles behind XProc implementation and then proceed by illustrating how XProc can be leveraged in the XML content delivery context. We will present a number of use cases and show some XProc pipelines that can be used for implementing the relevant functionality. For each use case, we will start by formulating a relatively simple introductory scenario (usually with equally simple solution) to get the reader familiar with the problem – and to show that even the simplest XProc pipelines can provide us with enough power for our needs. After that, we move on to a more challenging scenario, which will require us to use more complex XProc pipelines.

Ari Nordström Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG |mp3

Reuse is often the key selling point for XML authoring systems. This presentation examines reuse from various points of view, from the author’s to the developer’s, offering practical strategies for reuse of content. Markup design is discussed, as are necessary prerequisites for making such a system work. What should be reused, and when? How do you uniquely identify a resource, and what, exactly, is a resource anyway? How do you design a user interface that helps the author instead of hindering her? From a practical point of view, how do you design a publishing process that works?

A demonstration of such a system illustrates the points made.

Robin Berjon Robineko Play (33min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The tremendous uptake that XML benefited from a decade ago led to a great many XML vocabularies being defined, notably in the area of Web technology. But unfortunately there was not enough markup experience around to help so many projects avoid pitfalls.

This talk will look at a number of examples of vocabulary design failures in the area of Web languages, and discuss why they are problematic and how to avoid them.

Steve Peter Pragmatic Programmers Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

In this talk, we present the toolchain used to produce the award-winning Pragmatic Bookshelf titles and examine some of the pleasures and pitfalls encountered using TeX, XML, XSLT, Ruby and other open technologies.