The complete program has been published for Extreme Markup Languages Conference 2003, "There's Nothing So Practical as a Good Theory." Extreme 2003 will be held on August 4 - 8, 2003, once again in Montréal, Québec, Canada. The organizers include B. Tommie Usdin, Deborah A. Lapeyre, Steven R. Newcomb, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, and James David Mason. Extreme is described as "an unabashedly hard-core conference for the technically-oriented members of the information interchange and knowledge representation community. Extreme delegates devote the better part of a week to the unfettered pursuit of better understanding of: markup practice and theory; knowledge access and navigation; formal languages; modeling approaches, markup software development (and bold implementations); information philosophy; and ontologies, taxonomies, and vocabularies."

This year the Extreme attendees are serving up the usual quantity of Topic Maps, along with extreme presentations on polemical topics, modal logic, logic grammars, functional programming, validation algorithms, markup semantics, literate XSLTs, schema conformance, controlled vocabularies, RDF graphs, and more. Special reduced registration fees are available to full time students at accredited institutions

Extreme 2003 Conference Organizers

Conference Chair: B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies, Inc.

Conference Co-Chairs:

• Deborah A. Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies, Inc.
• Steven R. Newcomb, CoolHeads Consulting
• C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, W3C/MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
• James David Mason, Y-12 National Security Complex

Extreme Daily Polemics

While all the presentations aim to be extreme, the 'Daily Polemic' episodes are designed to be especially extreme:

• Daily Polemic: What can you do with half a parser?
  Simon St. Laurent, O'Reilly & Associates

  Current XML parsers and APIs tend to be tightly bound to the notions of trees and the resolutions of the XML Infoset model. There are many document processing requirements (to preserve DOCTYPE, to preserve entities, to use custom character rules, etc.) where it would be more useful to separate such parsing functions as syntax processing, well-formedness checking, entity resolution, attribute defaulting, namespace processing, structural validation, and presentation to the application. The Ripper parser breaks documents into components conforming to the markup grammar used by XML 1.0, leaving the application responsible for entity and character processing and normalization. Let me tell you why this is useful.

• Daily Polemic: Slashing brambles and sating digital hunger
  Neill Kipp, Kipp Software
  Sam Hunting, eTopicality

  As we seek to satiate our hunger for relevant, integrated information, we endure hardships and inconveniences that are unnecessary and obsolete. Simplifications in the technology environment are necessary and likely. A revised Transfer Protocol (TP) would use packet boundaries to represent the boundaries now more commonly represented by markup. A Simplified XML (SX), in combination with TP, would eliminate the need for many kinds of DOM node types. A generic Programming Language (PL) would provide an easy-to-use, well-managed, all-purpose syntactic abstraction.

• Daily Polemic: How Topic Maps can save the Semantic Web
  Steve Pepper, Ontopia

  The Semantic Web as currently envisioned is doomed to failure ... unless a basic architectural flaw is corrected. A lack of clarity regarding one of the Web's most fundamental ontological categories is preventing the identity of the things dealt with by the Semantic Web from being reliably established and in time this will lead to complete chaos. However, ideas originating in the Topic Maps paradigm offer a solution which, if adopted in RDF, would remove a major obstacle and help enable the realization of Tim Berners-Lee's vision.

Other Extreme Presentations

• It's the markup, stupid!
  B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies
• First thoughts on modal logic for document processing
  Allen Renear, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Typing in transformations
  Jeni Tennison, Jeni Tennison Consulting
• Late-Breaking News: Semantic Web Servers - Engineering the Semantic Web
  Graham Moore, Ontopia
• Late-Breaking News: A Semantic Web Integration Methodology
  Steven R. Newcomb, Coolheads Consulting
• STnG - a streaming transformations and glue framework
  K. Ari Krupnikov, University of Edinburgh
• Late-Breaking News: Beyond PSIs - Topic Map Design Patterns
  Kal Ahmed, Techquila
• Logic grammars and XML Schema
  C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, World Wide Web Consortium
• Late-Breaking News: Synthesizing Stylesheets Using "Literate XSLT"
  G. Ken Holman, Crane Softwrights
• XML Cyborgs: Accelerating Web Services with XML Hardware
  Michael Leventhal, Tarari
• Late-Breaking News: Content repurposing with Topic Maps: a real-world use in custom-publishing
  Nikita Ogievetsky, Cogitech & Roger Sperberg, XTMaps
• Object mapping for markup semantics
  David Dubin, University of Illinois
• Late-Breaking News: Browser Bookmark Management With Topic Maps
  Thomas B. Passin, Mitretek Systems
• Functional programming in XSLT using the FXSL library
  Dimitre Novatchev, International Atomic Energy Agency
• A network of controlled vocabularies for bridging people and places in corporate portals and beyond
  Mary Nishikawa, Schlumberger K. K.
• Generalizing XPath for directed graphs
  Steve Cassidy, Centre for Language Technology
• Taking topic maps to the nth dimension
  Eric Freese, LexisNexis
• Extreme Keynote
  William Kent. "William (Bill) Kent is the author of Data and Reality, perhaps the best book ever written about the concepts behind data modelling."
• Supporting UPA and restriction on an extension of XML Schema
  Matthew Fuchs, Westbridge Technology
  Allen Brown, Microsoft
• An XML Document Corresponds to Which FRBR Group 1 Entity?
  Allen Renear, Christopher Phillippe, Pat Lawton, Dave Dubin & other members of the UIUC/GSLIS Electronic Publishing Research Group
• Validation algorithm for attribute-element constraints of RELAX NG
  Makoto Murata, IBM
  Hosoya Haruo, Kyoto University
• Late-Breaking News: Analyzing and Visualizing the Structure of Medieval Encyclopedic Works with XML-Related Technologies
  David J. Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh
• Metadata on the web: On the integration of RDF and Topic Maps
  Paolo Ciancarini, Riccardo Gentilucci, Marco Pirruccio, Valentina Presutti, Fabio Vitali, University of Bologna
• Fine-grained publications management under topic map control
  Vinh Lê, U. S. Department of Energy
  James David Mason, Y-12 National Security Complex
• Datatype- and namespace-aware DTDs: A minimal extension
  Fabio Vitali, Nicola Amorosi , Nicola Gessa, University of Bologna
• Can topic maps describe context for enterprise-wide applications?
  Duane Degler, IPGems
  Lisa Battle, Lockheed Martin
• Gliding down from graphs to trees: An attempt to bottle geometry and chemical content
  K. Shanthi, S. K. Venkatesan, TnQ Books and Journals
• tolog for TMQL
  Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopia
• Late-Breaking News: XML Query Update: State of Publicly Available Implementations
  Liam Quin, W3C
• RDF Twig: Accessing RDF graphs in XSLT
  Norman Walsh, Sun Microsystems
• The difficulty of schema conformance problems
  Robert C. Lyons, Unidex
• Late-Breaking News: Efficiency Structured XML (esXML): XML Without Most Processing Overhead
  Stephen D. Williams, High Performance Technologies
• Containment of XPath expressions: An inference and rewriting based approach
  Jean-Yves Vion-Dury, Xerox Research Centre Europe
  Nabil Layaïda, INRIA
• Late-Breaking News: XML and the Art of Application Code Maintenance
  Martin Klang, Alpha Plus Technology
• Linking Strategies
  Ari Nordström, Sörman Information & Media AB
• XIndirect: Indirect addressing for XML
  W. Eliot Kimber, ISOGEN International
• Uniform access to infosets via reflection
  Henry S. Thompson, K. Ari Krupnikov, University of Edinburgh
• Playing by the Rules
  C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, World Wide Web Consortium

Extreme Reduced Registration Fees for Students

Reminder from a university professor who thinks Extreme is an excellent educational opportunity for students: "Extreme Markup 2003 has special student rates that are well below the regular rates. This is a unique conference of legendary intensity, presenting some of the most advanced innovative research in XML-related markup technologies. It is also an nice opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the leading figures in the XML world. And Montréal is a blast, of course..." The main conference registration for students is $150 USD (without lunches, August 5-8) or $275 USD with lunches.