Picking Papers

We just fin­ished the XML 2005 Plan­ning Com­mit­tee Selec­tion Meet­ing, three days at the end of last week. This is one of the fun, albeit exhaust­ing, parts of the con­fer­ence, when all the would-be speak­ers have sub­mit­ted their abstracts, the review­ers have graded them and com­men­ted on them, and then the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee gets to build a com­pel­ling sched­ule out of them.

The papers this year did­n’t fit into areas or tracks as neatly as in pre­vi­ous years; I think this means that XML usages are broad­en­ing away from the “clas­sic” publishing/web services/core tech­no­lo­gies and mov­ing into more mixed areas. It has­n’t been about the syn­tax for some years now, of course. There are papers that are show­ing more research into uses of XML, more rigour in design­ing sys­tems, and more emphas­is on get­ting things to work right.

Of course there were lots of papers where the authors proved they did­n’t both­er read­ing any of the hints on writ­ing abstracts on the con­fer­ence web site. When abstracts are meant to be 500 words long, those that are under 50 get short shrift by the review­ers. Those with mis­spelled acronyms or loaded up with buzzwords or that looked like advert­ise­ments for products did­n’t do too well either. For­tu­nately the review­ers did a good job at rank­ing the papers, and giv­ing us lots of com­ments to back up their grades, so I think we have a strong pro­gram this year, full of inter­est­ing con­tent. We’ll be pub­lish­ing the sched­ule once the accep­ted speak­ers have had a chance to con­firm their talks.

For those who don’t have speak­ing slots, or who get the dreaded rejec­tion email in the next week or so, don’t des­pair! We decided to keep the con­fer­ence con­tent really fresh this year by reserving 20% of the speak­ing slots for late-break­ing, instead of the usu­al 10%. So read over those writ­ing hints, mark your cal­en­dars for Septem­ber 16, and, come late July, see what holes we have in the sched­ule that your con­tent is per­fect for filling!