Conference organizers for Extreme Markup 2005 have issued a renewed call for papers in connection with the August 1-5, 2005 event, to be held in Montréal, Québec, Canada. April 15, 2005 is the deadline for paper proposals.

Extreme 2005 is presented by IDEAlliance in partnership with OASIS. IDEAlliance is a "non-profit membership organization dedicated to advancing user-driven, cross-industry specifications and best practices for all publishing and content-driven enterprises."

Extreme Markup is the laid-back, intellectually challenging, and mostly vendor-free annual conference for markup enthusiasts, dedicated to the theory and practice of markup languages. The organizers describe is as "an unfettered festival of unconventional markup with pointy-brackets, pointed questions, and sharp ideas. It's nearly a week of geek speak. It's also a peer-reviewed technical conference."

Extreme Markup accommodates industrial, academic, and other points of view. It "differs from other conferences partly in its unapologetic emphasis on technical subjects and problems on the frontiers of current practice, and partly in the participants it attracts. Extreme typically has an unusually high concentration of markup theorists, computer scientists, linguists, taxonomists, publishers, lexicographers, typographers, software developers, librarians, and other people you want to spend time with — also anarchists, curmudgeons, and deep thinkers — and a lower than average concentration of managers in need of a clue."

Topics covered at Extreme typically inclued any of the following: (1) XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, XPath, RSS, OWL, XTM; (2) XML querying and searching; (3) Knowledge representation: Topic Maps, RDF graphs, and semantic networks; (4) Constraint languages: DTDs and schemas; (5) Metadata registries and unregistered metadata; (6) Anthropology of markup adoption patterns; (7) XML databases and content management systems; (8) Performance and other deployment issues; (9) Making the world mark-uppable: ontologies, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and PSI; (10) The Next Big Edge Case; (11) Chicken lips, overlap, and other things you can't talk about without using your hands.

Conference Chairs and co-chairs for the Extreme 2005 event include the extreme B. Tommie Usdin (Mulberry Technologies, Inc), Deborah A. Lapeyre (Mulberry Technologies, Inc), C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (World Wide Web Consortium/MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory - CSAIL), Steven R. Newcomb (Coolheads Consulting), and James David Mason (Y-12 National Security Complex). Extreme Conference Advisors are Syd Bauman Jon Bosak Mary Fernandez, and Allen Renear.

Anyone tolerant of extreme technical content or desirous of acquiring such sensibilities is welcome to attend the conference. To have a paper accepted, one needs to have an acceptably extreme paper proposal and the ability to prepare it in SGML or XML using the instructions for authors. Electronic conference proceedings are produced each year from the SGML/XML source documents, and are made available to the public online.

Candidate papers for presentation at Extreme "must be all new material, address some aspect of information management from a theoretical or practical standpoint, and be detailed and rigorous. Submissions must be content- or technically-oriented; product or service descriptions or advertisements are not appropriate. Case studies should focus on the problem(s) and technical approaches to solving them. Sales pitches are extremely unwelcome and are very likely to be counter-productive. All proposals will be submitted for blind review to a peer review panel to aid in selection."