SGML: SGML '91 Program
Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml
Date: 01 Oct 1991 20:54:08 +0000
From: Yuri Rubinsky <yuri@sq.sq.com>
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada
Message-ID: <1991Oct1.205408.8123@sq.sq.com>
Subject: Upcoming SGML Conference (Soon!)(Long)
What follows is the text of the brochure which has just been made available
for the upcoming SGML 91 Conference. It makes for a long posting, but not
one word of the original has been omitted!
______________________________________________________________________
SGML '91 will be a high-speed, interactive, meeting of the people who are
using SGML right now or are just on the verge. We will hear SGML success
stories and discuss the problems and issues that face many users. The
agenda includes guided discussions of common concerns. Participants will
be called upon to join working groups and to contribute to conference
documents which may shape standard practice in this developing field.
Monday, October 21
8:00am Registration
9:00am SGML: The Year in Review
User Guide to the Conference
9:30am Keynote Address: SGML -- The Wonder Years
10:15am Break
10:30am Grammar Checking with SGML
11:00am Attaching Annotations
11:45am Using Architectural Forms
12:30pm Lunch
1:30pm Case Studies
* University of Florida
* Prime Computer
* NIST
3:00pm Break
3:15pm Case Studies Continued
AIS/Berger Levrault
Dataware Technologies
4:30pm Application Topic #1
Data for IETMS
5:00pm Adjourn
7:00pm Int'l SGML Users Group Mtg.
8:00pm Working Session #1: Standard Practices
Tuesday, October 22
9:00am Reports From The Front
* Open Software Foundation DTD
* What is the TEI up to Now
10:15am Break
10:30am Application Topic #2
Rapid DTD Development
11:00am Poster Session #1: Tables in The Real World
12:30pm Lunch
1:30pm Formatting Issues and Strategies
3:00pm Break
3:15pm Poster Session #2: Verification and Validation
5:00pm Adjourn
7:30pm AAP Math/Table Update Committee
8:00pm Working Session #2: A Tool for Developing SGML Applications
Wednesday, October 23
9:00am SGML -- The Management Issues
9:30am An SGML Document Database to Support Non-Linear Document Management
10:10am Break
10:30am A Bridge Between Technical Publications
and Design Engineering Databases
11:00am Poster Session #3: SGML Support for Databases and Hypertext
12:30pm Lunch
1:30pm Trainers Panel: What to Teach Whom, How, When, about SGML
2:00pm Reports from the Working Sessions
2:15pm Working Session #3: Bring Us Your Tired, Yearning to Be Solved
3:30pm Adjourn
7:30pm AAP Math/Table Update Committee
By attending SGML '91 you will have the opportunity to:
hear from the leaders in the field
share integration experience and application details with
fellow practitioners
examine the products (DTDs, documentation, output
specifications, and end products) of other SGML applications
participate in working groups
view much of the published literature on SGML, and
have the opportunity to examine
and buy books, manuals, tutorial guides, etc.
Each attendee will take home:
a collection of application samples sample and examples
(DTDs, FOSIs, etc.) draft reports from the working groups
summaries of SGML '91 presentations
Who should attend?
SGML '91 is a working conference of SGML professionals sharing
implementation experiences and discussing practical examples of their
application solutions in details. If you send your back room technicians
and wizards to only one conference a year, this should be the one.
Everyone who has written or adapted DTDs should bring them -- it's our
intent that there will be time to discuss general approaches and specific
constructs. People who have not yet begun to build DTDs should come armed
with a sense of their application.
What is a Poster Session Anyway? If you have ever been to a Science Fair
you have had the poster session experience. A poster session works like
this: There is general theme for the session, for example, Verification and
Validation. The chairman of the session will introduce the topics that
fall under the theme and each of the topic presenters will give a brief
description of what their session will cover. There may be as many as 10
different poster presenters. At this point the group divides into the
different interests each focused on one presenter. The room will be set up
so that each presenter has his or her own space with several chairs in
front of an easel or overhead projector. This set up allows attendees to
travel amongst the poster sessions. For example, during the descriptions
you may hear more than one session that sounds interesting to you.
Although the sessions are all going on at the same time, you are free to
move from one to another. Since these sessions are built around small
groups of people they are conducive to good discussion.
Note: If you have a topic that fits into one of the three poster sessions,
we would like to hear from you. Call Yuri Rubinsky at (416)-239-4801 or
Joy Blake at (703)-519-8177 to confirm your space on the program.
How are the Working Sessions Different from the Poster Sessions? If you
are interested in the working sessions at SGML91 make sure that you come
prepared to roll up your sleeves and get to work. These sessions are
intended to be in-depth group discussions whose goals include generation of
concrete proposals, plans or next steps. Similar sessions at previous SGML
conferences contributed to HyTime's functional requirements and helped
create the CALS DTD fragment for Electronic Review.
General Presentations
Keynote: SGML -- The Wonder Years. Pam Gennusa, Database Publishing
Systems Ltd. Pam will take a philosophical and technical look at how SGML
has matured since its adoption as an International Standard. She will also
discuss how the methodology and applications of SGML have expanded and
offer personal insight into the potential of SGML in future applications.
Grammar Checking With SGML. Haviland Wright, Avalanche Development Co.
Explanations of SGML applications often assert the separability of document
structure and document content; we often treat structure and content as
orthogonal. Of course, separability does not imply orthogonality. Content
is one of the guides for document tagging. And, document tagging can be a
guide for checking grammar and writing style. This talk describes some of
the work currently underway at Avalanche in this new area.
Attaching Annotations. Steve DeRose, Electronic Book Technologies. How do
you make annotations to an SGML document? Methods that actually modify the
published documents are unworkable except in a few special situations.
This presentation will discuss the alternatives that work and show how
these methods relate to standards recently adopted by the ANSI/ISO HyTime
committee and the TIE.
Using the Architectural Form in SGML & Hytime. Steve Newcomb,
Technoteacher. The DTD idea works well within a single community of
interest. However, different communities of interest with different
document type definitions, need to agree on the use of certain aggregations
of attributes and/or content models for certain kinds, or architectural
forms, of elements, without legislating generic identifiers or preventing
adaptions to special requirements. Used for the representation of
commonplace low-level mechanisms, architectural forms allow wider
interoperability of documents, and sell duplication of implementation
effort, without diminishing the expressive power of SGML.
User Case Studies
Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Dennis Watson, University of
Florida. As a public information provider, the Institute of Food and
Agricultural Sciences at the Universityof Florida has approximately 2500
publications available at a given point in time. With technological
advances demonstrated through the implementation of CD-ROM databases at
IFAS, they began looking at SGML as a means of storing their textual
information in a device-independent format. The "water tower' concept
where all publications are stored in electronic form was being envisioned.
This presentation will discuss how SGML has been implemented, its benefits
and constraints.
Prime Computer's New Online Platform. Susan Windheim, Prime Computer.
Prime Computer Technical Documentation Department plans to provide end-user
documentation for a new platform online. They are using an online software
package (Dynatext) that requires SGML tagged documents as input. To
produce their documents Prime plans to use several products: Interleaf and
troff, FastTag (Avalanche), Xtran (Software Exoterica), Author/Editor
(SoftQuad), and AWK. In addition Prime plans direct access to Unix
manpages from within the online system. A demonstration of how this system
works will be shown.
Use of SGML in the PDES and STEP Efforts. Sandy Ressler, NIST. This talk
will present a variety of issues and potential uses of SGML in the PDES
(Product Data Exchange using STEP) and STEP (Standard for The Exchange of
Product Model Data) efforts. STEP is an evolving international standard
which will be used by the CALS (Computer Aided Acquisition and Logistics
Support) activity for product data interchange. Background on the STEP
standardization effort and PDES activity will be presented. The potential
role of SGML in the PDES and STEP efforts is a focus.
Multi-Vendor Integration of SGML Tools for Legal Publishing. Francois
Chahuneau, AIS/Berger Levrault. An SGML-based editorial workbench which
combines several tools around a full text and relational database will be
presented. In this system, SGML text browsers, SGML text editors and
database query interfaces are integrated through a graphical user interface
developed under Unix/X-window. New concepts required by the communication
between these tools, such as "cut-and-parse" of SGML text objects, will be
discussed.
CD-ROM and Multimedia Publishing Today and In the Future. Tom Melander,
Dataware Technologies, Inc. This presentation will demonstrate how a
sample document, specifically a segment of the United States Tax Code as
originally published in non-SGML tagged form by the GPO is converted to a
simple SGML tagging scheme. This demonstrates how software can utilize the
markup information as a basis for defining how the information will be
searched and delivered. Enhancements in these areas will tend to focus on
the integration of text, data and graphics utilizing SGML, CGM and other
standards to create systems that can accept input from a variety of
different sources while producing integrated electronic documents that can
be shared and distributed on optical media.
Application Topics
Data for Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMS). Eric Freese,
RJO Enterprises.
Rapid DTD Development. Tommie Usdin, Atlis Consulting Group. The Rapid
Development presentation will begin with a brief history of Joint
Application Development (JAD) and show the similarity between systems
development in general and DTD development. This session will conclude by
describing the roles, functions, and reasonable expectations for a Rapid
DTD development session. By bringing these techniques to DTD development,
we can develop DTDs more quickly than in the past, and the DTDs developed
will come closer to meeting user needs, and will use user (not systems)
vocabulary.
Reports From the Front
The Pursuit of Document Type Definitions. Fred Dalrymple, Open Software
Foundation. OSF, a not-for-profit industry supported organization,
produces Open System software offerings that enable development of software
applications. Each of OSF's offerings is accompanied by source
documentation -- users manuals, UNIX reference manpages, specifications
documents, glossaries, etc. OSF's membership requested that OSF migrate
toward the use of SGML as the interchange language for its technical
publications. A discussion of OSF's pursuit of Document Type Definitions
and how SGML has affected their organization will be the focus for this
presentation.
What Is the TEI up to Now? Lou Burnard, Oxford University Press. This
presentation will give some flavor of the overall strategy adopted by the
Text Encoding Initiative in attempting to deal with the immense variety and
complexity of its materials, which range from medieval manuscripts to
terminological databanks. It will discuss some current encoding problem
areas (including, for example, conversational transcripts, linguistic
analysis, manuscript and early print rendition, historical source texts)
and describe briefly some new TEI-influenced projects. It will argue that
SGML offers a good tool for making explicit the interpretative frameworks
within which textual data is processed by different applications but that
full exploitation of its potential is hampered by a software industry
obsessed by publication and uninterested in analysis.
Wednesday's Presentations
SGML -- The Management Issue. Jerry Zadow, Consultant. Like most new
technical concepts we are often more familiar with the buzz-words than we
are with the actual capabilities provided, or the benefits therefrom. This
presentation will provide deeper insights as to why organizations might
want to go to the expense and effort to implement these new methodologies.
Discussions of effective and less or ineffective uses of SGML are
presented, and examples of the true power of SGML based information systems
are discussed. Future scenarios are also posited.
An SGML Document Database to Support Non-Linear Document Management. John
Gawkowski, Information Dimensions, Inc. This presentation will discuss the
relationship between SGML applications and the relational database. Issues
will include the mapping of SGML documents to a relational database, the
special considerations which must be addressed when dealing with text, and
the use of SGML as an intermediate form for advanced database applications.
SGML -- A Bridge between Technical Publications and Design Engineering
Databases. Jeff Lankford, Northrop Research & Technology Ctr. Technical
authoring is amenable to automation because much textual material is
available in design engineering databases. SGML is well suited to provide
a bridge between technical publication and engineering databases, since it
is rich enough to express both attributes and relationships of a broad
variety of data. This presentation describes one way Northrop Corporation
uses SGML to prepare such information for presentation in different formats
suitable for particular classes of readers, while reducing labor intensive
authoring and editing.
Poster Sessions
Tables in The Real World. Eric Severson, Avalanche Development Co., Chair.
What are tables? Multidimensional arrays of data? Graphical works of art?
Or both? Is there a best way to express them in SGML? This session will
examine differing opinions and assess the state of the art in SGML table
markup. We will look at current example from ISO, CALS, AAP and others,
plus explore the future implications of hypertext, SGML databases and
desktop retrieval.
Verfication and Validation. Mark Buckley, Bellcore, and Debbie Lapeyre,
Managematics, Co-chairs. SGML parsers verify the syntactical correctness
of SGML markup for a particular DTD. However, they do not address the
semantic dimensions of tagging; they cannot, for example, ensure that the
words contained in a <title> element really contain a title. This poster
session addresses issues pertaining to the validation and verification of
semantic levels of SGML tags, and presents strategies for providing such
validation.
SGML for Databases and Hypertext. Steve DeRose, Electronic Book
Technologies, Chair. SGML can represent a wide variety of structured data,
not just text, and can provide hooks to any kind of data desired.
Databases typically represent information in rows and columns, and
hypermedia is characterized by supporting cross-references between data
elements. This session will explore ways to represent such data in SGML,
how SGML-based systems can interact with traditional database systems,
issues in designing multimedia DTDs, and how existing and forthcoming
standards such as TEI and HyTime can be applied to real encoding problems.
Working Sessions
Standard Practices. Eric Severson, Avalanche Development Co., Chair.
Currently there is no "standard practice or standard conceptual
architecture for SGML. This session will begin work on high-level
functional specifications for the generic SGML application (you will fill
in the details for a particular instance).
A Tool for Developing SGML Applications. Tommie Usdin, Atlis Development
Group, Chair. This working session will try to produce a high-level
functional specification for an ideal automated SGML application
development support tool. We will identify the end products to come from
such a tool, including both SGML application-related products, such as
DTDs, and documentation such as data dictionaries, warnings, etc.
Disclaimer: This session is not associated with any on-going development
effort, nor does the chair know of anyone intending to develop our fantasy
tool.
Bring Us Your Tired, Yearning to Be Solved. Debbie Lapeyre, Managematics,
Chair. This session is designed to help you with those hard to solve
problems associated with SGML and DTD's. We encourage you to bring any
difficult problem - analytical, organizational or DTD specific and all of
us, together, will work toward a solution.
Registration Fees
Fees include all tutorial and/or conference materials, luncheons and
refreshment breaks. Hotel accommodations are not included. Each
registrant pays the hotel directly at time of check-out.
Tutorial Fee
GCA Member $40
Nonmember $75
SGML '91 Conference Fee
GCA Member $525
Nonmember $725
Hotel Information
GCA has reserved a block of rooms at the Omni Biltmore Hotel, Kennedy
Plaza, Providence, Rhode Island. The GCA has negotiated a reduced rate of
$95 single $110 double for attendees. Rates are subject to local tax rate
of 12%. For reservations, call the hotel directly at (401) 421-0700 and
identify yourself as a GCA registrant. The cut-off date for reservations
is September 27, 1991. Reservations after this date will be accepted on a
space/rate available basis.
Travel
GCA has negotiated a special fare with American Airlines that can save you
45% off regular coach fare or 5% off the lowest American promotional fare.
Call American's toll free number 800/433-1790 (in Texas 800/792-1160) and
give the operator the GCA STAR file number S-02Z178. Also inquire about
reduced rates on rental cars. You may also call Columbia Travel, GCA's
official agent, to make your travel arrangements at 800/822-3399 (in
Virginia, 703/243-2900). Both will book you on the most direct route with
this special fare or the lowest fare possible.
Transportation to the Hotel
T.L. Greene Airport -- 2 miles, 15 min.
Providence Train Station -- 1 mile, 5 min.
Providence Bus Station -- 2 blocks
Easy access from I-95
Attire for the Conference
The SGML conference is intended to be small and relaxed in an informal,
focused, concentrated way. It will be full of the give-and-take of
discussion and shared learning.
To register
Complete information below and return to GCA. Make necessary reservations
with hotel. All fees, check and/or credit card information must accompany
registration. Mail registration and payment to GCA, 100 Daingerfield Rd.,
Alexandria VA 22314-2804 Phone 703/519-8162 or FAX 703/548-2867 with credit
card information.
To cancel
For full or partial refund, cancellations must be received in writing or by
fax before 12:00 noon on October 11, 1991. After that date, registrants
are liable for the entire registration fee. Substitutions are welcome.
Registration Form
SGML 91
Omni Biltmore
Providence, Rhode Island
October 20-23, 1991
Indicate name as it will appear on badge
Name
Title
Company
Address
City/State/Zip
Area Code/Phone Date
I am attending:
Just Enough Tutorial (October 20):
GCA member $40; Nonmember $75
SGML '91 Conference (October 21-23):
GCA member $525; Nonmember $725
Billing information:
Check enclosed (Make checks payable to Graphic Communications Association)
Credit Card: __Visa __MC __AmEx
Card Number Expiration Date
Signature