Since my last posting, some weblogs have mentioned that I was blogging the XML 2006 conference, so I feel bad that I haven’t gotten to my second posting about it until after the end of the conference. Most of my time sitting at a computer in Boston was spent on a project for a client, and there was enough of this that I had to skip several talks that I wanted to see. (For a little multi-tasking, I reviewed some project documents while Jason Hunter discussed Web Publishing 2.0. Jason was…

I just got into my Boston hotel room for XML 2006, a conference I’ve attended in one form or another every year since it was called SGML 95. On Thursday afternoon I’m giving a presentation titled Relational database integration with RDF/OWL on a project I’ve written about several times ([1], [2]) here; I’ll be sure to mention the help I got from the excellent comments for those entries of my weblog and several leading up to them. I was also asked to keep a presentation I…

After styling some headers in a sample Word document as Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and so forth, I was pleased to see that when I saved the document as Word 2003 XML, sub-section container elements were wrapped around the appropriate elements, grouping a Heading 3 title and all block elements up to the next Heading 3 (or higher) block together, nested within the group that began with a Heading 2, etc. (Although Open Office 2.0 offers Word 2003 XML as a Save As choice, it does not add these…

This summer was the seventh year that the CSW Group sponsored their XML Summer School in Oxford, England. CSW’s offices are on the outskirts of Oxford, but they rent facilities within the ancient university to hold the classes. For the last few years they’ve held it at Wadham College, with a beautiful campus that was first build in the early seventeenth century. (To hear my father describe it, I’m an Oxford don, so I try to explain “Dad… it’s a consulting…

John Cowan recently announced the availability of release 1.0 of TagSoup, his Open Source Java tool that parses even the ugliest HTML and lets you treat it like well-formed XML.

This week I gave a talk to some biology researchers at the University of Virginia. The basic thesis was that large databases typically need to fit into the neat rows and columns of relational tables, but that new XQuery/XML databases let you store and retrieve huge amounts of data with potentially much more complex structure, and that while this has obvious applications in the publishing world—the world that begat XML—it could have useful applications in other domains as well. I never got past…

The XML Summer School, a week of seminars on a wide range of XML-related topics sponsored by the CSW Group at a college of Oxford University, is being held for the sixth year. Peter Flynn and I hold the distinction of being the only people to have taught every year, but the list of people who have taught for most of those years the roster of new people each year are both very distinguished lists.