Anyway

The CSW XML Sum­mer School is where I typ­ic­ally spend the last week of July each year. As the name implies, it’s more like a school than a con­fer­ence, with the emphasis on teach­ing imme­di­ately use­ful stuff rather than bleed­ing edge dis­course. I really enjoy going each year and there are lots of reas­ons for that.

One is the envir­on­ment, of course. It’s not every day you get to stay in an Oxford Col­lege, and the Sum­mer School is usu­ally held in Wadham Col­lege, one of the older col­leges. It’s close to the Bodleian Lib­rary and the Oxford Uni­ver­sity Museum of Nat­ural His­tory, where we had din­ner one evening.

Which brings me to the other reason the school is fun– the emphasis on learn­ing within a social envir­on­ment. So there’s lots of talk­ing about details of sys­tems, and inter­change of ideas, over beers in one of Oxford’s many pubs. Or in the above-mentioned museum.

I spoke on factors to con­sider when mod­el­ling inform­a­tion to put into schemas, and pulled together and chaired a day on “What’s Hot and What’s Not” which was extremely thought-provoking. I cer­tainly came back with lots of ideas from it, and oth­ers who atten­ded said the same. Here are the people on the fir­ing line…

I’ll prob­ably be coordin­at­ing and chair­ing the same type of ses­sion at next year’s Sum­mer School.