XML Summer School 2009

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Nov 202009
 

The XML Sum­mer School in Oxford at the end of Septem­ber was the usu­al mix of inter­est­ing present­a­tions, punt­ing, good dis­cus­sions in the pubs, and wan­der­ing around old build­ings. The pho­tos I took have none of the first, little of the last, and an over-pro­por­tion­al num­ber of punt­ing and pubs, mostly because that’s when the cam­era did its job best. These are all part of the XML Sum­mer School 2009 group on Flickr, if you want more pho­tos of that week in Oxford.

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Gearing up for Oxford

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Sep 042009
 

This year the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford is at the end of Septem­ber, rather a change from pre­vi­ous years, when it was in July. This morn­ing on the organ­ising call we decided that we need to go punt­ing on the Monday before din­ner rather than after din­ner, since the even­ings will be dark soon­er, but that’s about the only draw­back to the late-sum­mer timing. 

Apart from being heav­ily involved in organ­ising the event, I’m chair­ing two courses this year. There’s Trends and Tran­si­ents, a fun day with lots of dis­cus­sion and debate about hyped, over-hyped, and cur­rent tech­no­logy issues. This year we have Tony Coates talk­ing about how XML could have saved us from the cur­rent fin­an­cial crisis (some­what tongue-in-cheek), Paul Downey rant­ing on what’s wrong with Rich Inter­net Applic­a­tions, and Rich Salz telling you what to look for and avoid in cloud com­put­ing. The day is capped off by uncon­fer­ence ses­sions in the even­ing where every­one gets to have their say in as much length as people will listen to them. 

New this year is the oth­er course I’m chair­ing, the Semant­ic Tech­no­lo­gies course, where Bob DuCh­arme, Leigh Dodds, Andy Seaborne, and Duncan Hull are join­ing forces to teach classes in Linked Data, OWL, RDF, SPARQL, and all those oth­er acronyms that are form­ing the basis of what some people are call­ing Web 3.0. I’m look­ing for­ward to catch­ing up on what’s new in all of these, and fig­ur­ing out wheth­er some might be use­ful for a pro­ject I have in mind.

I haven’t decided which oth­er courses and classes I’ll sit in on yet; they all look good.

Summer of XML

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Apr 212009
 

One of my cur­rent pro­jects is as Course Dir­ect­or for the revamped XML Sum­mer School in Oxford, Eng­land. John Chel­som asked me to help out and I was only too happy to say yes; I have many fond memor­ies from pre­vi­ous years. It will be more a late-sum­mer school this year, being from Septem­ber 20–25, but that does free up more of the sum­mer prop­er for oth­er things, not to men­tion giv­ing us more time to fig­ure out the sched­ule and speakers. 

Anoth­er advant­age of late sum­mer for the XML Sum­mer School is that it does­n’t clash with Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal, Canada, which is on August 11–14 (with the sym­posi­um on pro­cessing XML effi­ciently on the 10th). Papers for that are due on April 24, so you don’t have much time to get them in if you’re plan­ning on speak­ing. Any markup-related top­ic is wel­come, as long as it is of suf­fi­cient qual­ity and depth.

It’s inter­est­ing com­par­ing the two — Bal­is­age is a geek’s con­fer­ence, unapo­lo­get­ic­ally aimed at people who are think deeply about the issues, even if they’re not apply­ing them at work. The XML Sum­mer School is more like train­ing, aimed at less expert prac­ti­tion­ers of and new­comers to XML, and more likely to be atten­ded by people who want to go back to work the next week and apply what they’ve learned dir­ectly. A few of the speak­ers are the same, of course, and the dis­cus­sions over din­ner tend to veer in some of the same directions. 

And, of course, both con­fer­ences are on Twit­ter; Bal­is­age at http://twitter.com/Balisage and the XML Sum­mer School at http://twitter.com/xmlsummerschool.

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