XML, OASIS and xml.org
Pam Gennusa

Pam, recently appointed OASIS' representative in Europe, will provide an overview of the consortium's current range of activities, including the work of the technical committees, the xml.org initiative, and their work on ebXML.

The Text Encoding Initiative as an XML DTD for practical publishing
Lou Burnard and Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford University Computing Services

Lou and Sebastian will review the TEI's suitability for book production (ie does it have the necessary markup), look at some real-life projects, and talk about both typesetting and HTMLizing the result.

Why is RSS becoming the ubiquitous news summary format?
James Carlyle, xmlTree

The presentation will include:

• Introduction to what xmlTree is
• What I hoped people would be doing with XML when I set up the directory, and how I saw people using the director
• What XML content is being publicised currently
• What the factors are behind the rapid growth of RSS publishing - simplicity vs. complexity, infrastructure (out of the box functionality), business models audience size
• What lessons other publishers can learn

Using XML to publish Shakespeare online
Nick Kind, Nelson

Nick will present Arden Online, a resource for Shakespeare scholars worldwide.

An XML-based data store for PC World Online
Nathan Birtle, Arbortext

PC World Online is building a data-mining tool and navigation scheme around its XML data store in order to let visitors find discrete bits of information in the vast amount of content on the site, allowing each visitor to customize his or her experience. In addition to increasing the value to visitors of PC World's content, converting to XML has allowed the editors of PC World Online to handle tasks that were traditionally done by producers, allowing them more control over the finished product.

Introducing XML into the curriculum at the University of Huddersfield
Ann Wrightson, University of Huddersfield

Ann, who is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems in the School of Computing and Mathematics, will describe her introduction of XML into the curriculum during the last academic year, and how that is now developing in response to industry changes.

XML and the delivery of engineering product data for technical writers
Robin LaFontaine, Monsell EDM

Full integration of technical documentation and product data is the target! Work has been going on within ISO to harmonise product data standards (STEP) and documentation standards (XML/SGML). The initial part of this is to use XML as a format for product data - this will give much better access to this data for those who are not familiar with the file formats currently used in this domain. XML formats are being defined both for the data and for the data definition language: the information modelling language EXPRESS. Issues include: What is the best way to use XML for exchanging complex data structures, with several thousand element type definitions? Do information models really help in defining XML formats? When will XML formats for engineering product data become available? What does the STEP/SGML harmonisation promise?

XML/EDI: an update on developments in the Healthcare and Transport sectors
Daniel Rivers-Moore, Rivcom

Daniel will present a progress report on the work of the European Union XML/EDI Pilot Project. It is hoped that this will include some practical demonstrations of work in progress for applications in the Healthcare and Transport sectors.

Wireless Markup Language and Wireless Binary XML: introduction and demonstration of prototype applications
Antony Scott, Rivcom

Antony Scott will give a short presentation on what is happening with WML (Wireless Markup Language) and WBXML (Wireless Binary XML). This will include demonstrations of a few prototype applications that point the way to the future use of XML technology to enable mobile phone access to the web.

XML for vehicle diagnostics
Amanda Smith, Genrad

Some headings from Amanda's intended presentation: How low can you go? How can XML replace a fully-featured programming language - a development roadmap. Small is beautiful. Small modular DTD's for vehicle diagnostics - no more recursion. Writers cramp? Authoring XML-based Diagnostics - Linear verses 2-dimensional trees. Delivering variant-based diagnostics. Dynamic data.

Topic Maps For Repositories
Kal Ahmed, Chrystal Software

Topic Maps are XML or SGML documents which describe an information set as a collection of 'topics'. Topics may have instances in multiple locations and may also be interrelated by user-definable relationship functions. Topic Maps grew out of a need to describe publication indices, but the data model of the Topic Map standard provides classification, navigation and search facilities which could be profitably applied to repository access. This paper provides a brief introduction to the data model of the Topic Map standard. The paper also describes the use of topic maps for replacing the traditional, hierarchical folder/document view of a document repository. The talk will include a sample application, and a demonstration of this technology.