2023 Call for Papers

This year's theme is markup quality assurance.

Markup itself, of course, is about adding semantics and precision to content, allowing us to author, process, and publish information faster while avoiding the pitfalls of the many manual tweaks necessary in unstructured word processing. But automation is not without its problems:

But remember, markup is not just XML. How do you measure quality in Markdown documents? JSON? YAML? Have we learned anything since SGML?

As always, we welcome any markup-related abstract of interest - markup QA is an important area for us all, but by no means the only one.

Abstract submission is now closed. What you should do instead is to check out the programme and register.

Lingunixtix

Lingunixtix is a typesetting linguist and connaisseur of free software with small memory, cpu and carbon footprints. From his point of view xml languages are languages, too and large and complicated document processing systems may look like newly invented squared wheels to him. Lingunixtix never leaves house without Occam's razor and seeks to reduce unnecessarily complex systems by an order of magnitude, or two. His credo is "Sine necessitate entia non sunt multiplicanda" – Without need things must not be multiplied. And "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." (Henry Spencer, programmer)

Daniel Arthursson

Daniel Arthursson, CEO CloudBackend

Daniel Arthursson created his first XML parser in C++ in 1996. Then went on to the create an XML/Application Server in 1998 (similar to php, but development 100% in XML). He then did the architecture of a XML-based Content Management Systems (CMS) based on the XML Application Server. Then he started the work on the XIOS/3 Edge Application Platform, initially intended to be a Client Application Server that shifted execution from the cloud to web browsers. The work of CloudBackend and its architecture started as a complement to XIOS/3 with the intent of being the backend data storage capability of a traditional application server and database.

Some of these learning was applied to build the iCloud.com service, which Daniel founded. It included cloud storage and productivity applications and many of his previous learnings. Apple acquired iCloud in 2011 and Daniel continued to build the CloudMe.com cloud/sync storage service. The work with CloudTop, the XML OS, which is another invention from Daniel, is something that has been going on in parallel over the years.

In 2018 XIOS/3 and CloudBackend became their own companies and what is the modern versions of these long-term research projects started to see its day. CloudTop has been migrated into these new platforms over the last couple of years for a potential future relaunch.

A red thread of what Daniel has been doing over the last 26 years is to build and innovate technology that makes as much use of XML as possible. He has also been teaching XML to many larger enterprises in Sweden through several educational companies.

Achim Berndzen

Achim earned an M.A. in philosophy at Aachen University and has more than 20 years of teaching experience in communications. In 2014 he founded <xml-project />. He is developer of MorganaXProc, a fully compliant XProc processor with an emphasis on configurability and plugability. He is a member of the XProc 3.0 editors group and currently develops MorganaXProc-III.

Achim also works on projects use the power of XML technologies in web applications.

Francis Cave

Francis has been involved in the development of markup language standards for almost forty years. He was a member of the expert working group that supported Charles Goldfarb in the development of ISO 8879 SGML in the mid 1980s. He is currently Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, the international standard committee responsible for the DSDL suite of markup language standards that includes RELAX NG, Schematron, NVDL and CREPDL. He is an active member of the ISO Working Group maintaining the office document file format standard ISO/IEC 29500 OOXML, and is also a co-editor of the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF). His commercial work focuses on the design and development of XML workflows for publishers.

Kurt Conrad

Kurt starts stuff up. Conversations. Improvisational ensembles. Communities of practice. Nuclear reactors and SGML training programs for the US Department of Energy. XML systems and new organizations for many others.

He's found that getting everyone on the same page before designing and engineering page-production pipelines speeds progress. His latest work involves using bottom-up, multi-perspective decision making techniques to codify both community values and semantic values in order to develop agreements and bots that better-manage complexity and accelerate change.

Tony Graham

Tony Graham is a Senior Architect with Antenna House, where he works on their XSL-FO and CSS formatter, cloud-based authoring solution, and related products. He also provides XSL-FO and XSLT consulting and training services on behalf of Antenna House.

Tony has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSLT/XSL-FO since 1998. He is Chair of the Print and Page Layout Community Group at the W3C and previously an invited expert on the W3C XML Print and Page Layout Working Group (XPPL) defining the XSL-FO specification, as well as an acknowledged expert in XSLT. Tony is the developer of the 'stf' Schematron testing framework and also Antenna House's 'focheck' XSL-FO validation tool, a committer to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT testing frameworks, the author of "Unicode: A Primer", and a qualified trainer.

Tony's career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, UK, and Ireland. Before joining Antenna House, he had previously been an independent consultant, a Staff Engineer with Sun Microsystems, a Senior Consultant with Mulberry Technologies, and a Document Analyst with Uniscope. He has worked with data in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and with academic, automotive, publishing, software, and telecommunications applications. He has also spoken about XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, EPUB, and related technologies to clients and conferences in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Andreas Jung

Andreas Jung is the founder of ZOPYX Limited. Upon completing his studies in computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Saarland, Andreas pursued a career in electronic publishing, gaining experience with a variety of publishers and in a variety of roles (Infeurope, Saarbrücker Zeitung Publishing House and Printing Press, Haufe-Lexware GmbH). Andreas founded ZOPYX Limited in 2004. He has been implementing sophisticated solutions for web portals (intranet, internet, extranet), electronic publishing and diverse individual software developments ever since.

Andreas is the creator and maintainer of the print-css.rocks project and has been a PrintCSS advocate for more than ten years now.

Michael H Kay

Michael Kay spent the first 25 years of his career working in total obscurity on billion-dollar projects within the (then) UK computer manufacturer ICL. So he's well aware that most of the XML action occurs well out of the gaze of the internet public, and that the impact of a technology like XML or XSLT continues to grow long after it has lost its youthful sex appeal. Hopefully some of the people doing unseen mega-projects with XML are in the audience today.

He moved into the limelight when he was asked to take on the job of editing the W3C XSLT 2,0 specification in 2002, and then went on to set up Saxonica in 2004, imagining that this might be an enjoyable way to spend a few years before retirement. 20 years on, retirement is as far off as ever. When the W3C activity on XSLT and XPath closed down after completing XSLT 3.0 in 2017, he felt there was unfinished work to be done, and this led eventually to the creation of a Community Group to develop a 4.0 specification. That group has been highly active over the last year, and this talk will describe the current state of its specifications - which are very much work in progress, despite the fact that experimental implementations of new features appear regularly in new Saxon and BaseX releases.

Jirka Kosek

Jirka is a freelance consultant specialized in XML publishing workflows. He teaches XML and Web technologies at the University of Economics in Prague and also delivered commercial training to more then thousand people. He is active in standards development and if time permits he contributes to several open-source projects. Together with a few devoted fellows he organizes XML Prague conference.

Martin Kraetke

Martin Kraetke graduated as engineer for print production and is Lead Content Engineer at le-tex in Leipzig where he works on the transpect framework and the xerif typesetting system.

He teaches XML and XSLT at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences.

Christophe Marchand

Christophe Marchand is a passionate developer, involved in software quality for years. He has work to provide continuous integration tools for XML technologies, by developing many Maven plugins.

He also teaches Java, Software Craftsmanship and XML languages.

David Maus

David Maus  (dmaus.name) is Head of Research & Development at Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg. He is the lead developer and maintainer of SchXslt, an XSLT-based Schematron processor.

Octavian Nadolu

Octavian is a product manager working for Syncro Soft, the company that produces Oxygen XML Editor. He has more than 15 years of experience in working with XML technologies and contributes to a number of XML-related open source projects. He is also the editor of the Schematron QuickFix specification developed by the Quick-fix support for XML W3C community group.

Martin Nilsson

Martin Nilsson, CTO XIOS/3

Martin Nilsson has a wide experience of both the client and server side of internet, having worked at Roxen Internet Software with web server development, building a markup-based programming language, and Content Management System (CMS) development, DivX Networks and as the Senior Architect of the Opera Mini web browser.

He has been active in standardization efforts in MPEG, W3C and IETF.

Martin is the CTO and architect for the development of the XIOS/3 Edge Application Platform, enabling developers to build web applications in XML.

Steven Pemberton

Steven Pemberton is a researcher, author, public speaker, and occasional broadcaster, affiliated with the CWI, the Dutch national research centre for mathematics and informatics. His research is in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can support users.

He co-designed the ABC programming language that formed the basis for Python, and was one of the first handful of people on the open internet in Europe, when the CWI set it up in 1988.

Involved with the Web from the beginning, he organised two workshops at the first Web Conference in 1994. For the best part of a decade he chaired the W3C HTML working group, and has co-authored many web standards, including HTML, XHTML, CSS, XForms and RDFa. He continues to chair the XForms and ixml groups at W3C, and was until recently a member of the ODF (Open Document Format) technical committee. More details at http://www.cwi.nl/~steven

Liam Quin

Liam Quin (www.delightfulcomputing.com) was in charge of XML development at W3C and now runs an independent XML consulting and training business in Canada.

Sven Reinck

Sven Reinck is a software developer and IT trainer from Hamburg, Germany. He graduated with a Master of Computer Science in 2007 and has been working as a freelance IT trainer since 2012. He specializes in Java, Kotlin, Groovy, C++, OpenGL, and JavaFX. In 2014, he developed Javis, a software to visualize abstract concepts of Java. In 2019, he founded FLUXparticle, a company that develops software for the visualization of abstract concepts in programming. In 2021, he developed the XSD Visualizer plugin, a tool for visualizing XML schemas. Sven is passionate about software development and education, and he is always looking for new ways to make programming more accessible and understandable.

Thorsten Rohm

Thorsten started working with SGML applications for print output and electronic publishing in 1997. He was active in prepress for various legal publishers in the areas of data structuring, transformation and enhancement. Since 2002 he deals with XML, XSLT, XSL-FO and Antenna House Formatter as well as other XML technologies.

In 2009 he moved on to Thieme Compliance GmbH were he now is employed as Head of Content Architecture & Management. Together with his team, he focuses on the further development of the XML content and ensures its single-source capability. The main task is on the development and maintenance of publishing pipelines for fully or highly automated output in a wide variety of media forms.

He loves everything markup and is very interested in exchange with the XML community.

Andrew Sales

Andrew Sales is Chief Content Architect at Bloomsbury Publishing Group plc, working mainly for its academic and professional division.

Andrew has been working with XML in publishing and specializing in quality assurance since 2000. In that time, he has modelled, validated and manipulated a wide range of content, from automotive and legal to pharmacology, education, rare books, drama, screenplays and timber. He developed a commercial Java-based product, a precursor to ISO Schematron, as well as an implementation of that standard.

Since 2016 he has been Project Editor of ISO/IEC 19757-3 (Schematron), and has presented at XML Prague and XML London. As well as serving on the programme committee of those conferences, he is co-founder and co-organizer of Markup UK, a conference about XML and other markup languages.

Jorge Sanchez

Jorge Sánchez is a software engineering and management professional with more than 20 years of experience in development, analysis and management for companies like GFT, Steria, Everis or Entelgy working primarily on J2EE projects for clients like DGT, Deutsche Bank, Inditex, Indra, AENA, RFEF or JWG-it.

Regarding Markup, Jorge's areas of interest include the combining document and model based information (SYSML, UML and Xmi¬) with traditional management sources like Spreadsheets to elaborate the project information better and in a more efficient way. Jorge also contributed to the StratML project with an improvement of the StratML form.

Erik Siegel

Erik is a self-employed content engineer and XML specialist, working from the Netherlands. Most clients are from the publishing industry or involved in standardization.

Coming from a technical Background, Erik is deliberately looking for content and XML related projects on all levels: from the strategic use of standards to developing processing applications. Documenting and explaining difficult subjects, whether in prose or as a course, is something he likes to as an addition to all the technical work.