XTech 2005
"I understand XML, I just don't understand any of the other things that start with 'X'"--Overheard at XTech 2005
In this XML-Deviant column, I reflect on the recent XTech conference in Amsterdam, May 25-27, 2005. The conference used to be called 'XML Europe', but under the guidance of conference chair Edd Dumbill, this year's event got a new name as well as two new conference tracks: Open Data, and Browser Technologies. Thus, instead of a pure XML focus, the event could stretch out more and cover related areas such as web applications, weblogs, search, and the semantic web. Even the conference schedule got remixed into several new forms, showing a mix of both open data and browser technology.
Attendees liked this new format, though it did at times create some tough choices over which sessions to attend. As a result, a purely chronological discussion of the sessions would incur several abrupt context switches. So, the discussion follows topical grouping rather than the strict order in which things occurred.
Open Data
The conference day started with keynotes on Wednesday only. The first came from Paula Le Dieu, who holds several titles, including Executive Director, Science Commons, Creative Commons International. She spoke at length about the BBC's ongoing effort under the banner of Creative Archive. You have to love a talk that include clips of overdubbed world leaders crooning and a music video created by a huge number of in-game players of Star Wars Galaxies, a popular, massively multiplayer game. By showing off such works, Le Dieu emphasized that people are using new technology to be creative in new ways that weren't even imagined a few years ago--but in order for this to work, copyright and other IP laws need to be appropriately balanced. The time is coming soon, if it's not here already, when individuals and small groups can produce new forms of creativity that can compete with mass media.
Overall, the BBC archive has 1.5 million video and film pieces and half a million recordings. Before being able to release some of these materials they needed a communications and legal framework to make these materials available to "rip, mix, and share". The license they ended up with is similar to a Creative Commons license, with five main facets:
- Non-commercial use only.
- Share-alike clause (derived works must be placed under the same license).
- Attribution required.
- No endorsement and no derogatory use (not for campaigning, soapboxing or to defame others).
- Available to broadband users within the UK for use primarily within the UK.
Some of the restrictions beyond vanilla Creative Commons licenses are necessary because of the way many BBC works tend to be originated and funded. However, it will be interesting to see how the UK-only rule works in practice out on the inherently borderless internet. Le Dieu did note that the project is experimenting with GEOIP restrictions, and that any more sophisticated kind of DRM simply "doesn't work".
OpenDocument
In another session, Michael Brauer, chair of the OASIS OpenDocument committee, talked about OpenDocument, which was recently ratified as an OASIS standard. Work on the file format has been ongoing since 1999, and since 2002 within OASIS. In his words, the format provides a way to store documents so that they will still be readable "in 20 years". Despite this refreshingly conservative stance, the format has taken in several recent XML technologies, including Relax NG, CSS3, XForms 1.0, and SVG 1.1. OpenOffice 2.0 will use OpenDocument as the primary, native save format. Other packages, including KOffice, are also coming online with support.
Beagle
Novell's Jon Trowbridge gave an informative and entertaining talk on "Beagle: Free and Open Desktop Search". Beagle is an open source search service much like the recently vaunted Spotlight included in OS X Tiger. Does it work? "More or less. You can run it every day," said Trowbridge. A key strength of the system is that it works mainly with open data formats, reading from the file system, email/contacts (via Evolution), IM (via Gaim), notes (via Tomboy), audio and ID3 tags, image and EXIF metadata, source code, and even PDF. Trowbridge's conclusion and take-home point: "Just like data should be free and open, the way to search it should be free and open."
Compound Documents
Morning sessions on Friday covered the always-challenging area of compound documents and integration. IBM's Kevin Kelly spoke about a Model Driven approach to Compound Documents. The two major categories of compound documents are 1) by reference: for example, with an <object> or <img> tag pointing to an external file such as a SVG image; and 2) by inclusion: for example, with SVG elements appearing inline in an XHTML document. Kelly's work in this area utilizes the Eclipse framework, which includes an extensive modeling framework, to develop platform-independent, and then platform-specific, models of compound documents. Within Eclipse, this allows new compound document types to be created for editing based on an internal model repository, complete with a list of allowed root elements and directed editing to show what is allowed at any point. Kelly concluded with an intriguing thought: "Couldn't we use these models for other things as well?"
Immediately following Kelly's session, Mark Baker talked about the ongoing work within the W3C Compound Documents Working Group. Unfortunately, an official working draft wasn't available by the time of the conference, leaving little to talk about, but the long Q & A session that followed proved to be useful.
Overall, the open data movement shows signs of being a healthy, thriving, growing community. The early struggles of the Compound Documents group, however, point to deeper problems, which I suspect are related to inadequate scoping of the initial XML namespaces work. One of the original visions for XML has always been the ability to combine all different sorts of vocabularies into structured documents, in a semantically meaningful way. XML namespaces helped solve the potential problem of conflicting element names, but didn't anticipate bigger problems like cross-vocabulary DOM access, event flow, combinatorial mediatype explosions, or content negotiation. It's a testament to the strength of open data that it has attained so much traction, even in the current environment. The Compound Document Working Group has quite a challenge ahead.
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