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International Symposium on

XML for the Long Haul
Issues in the Long-term Preservation of XML

Monday 2 August 2010
Hotel Europa, Montréal, Canada


Chair: Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies

Nearly everywhere, people who create, store, query, or serve XML expect it to live a very long time. XML is platform- and application-independent, and by and large it is platforms and applications that vanish. If by encoding information in XML we have freed it from dependency on specific platforms or applications, have we succeeded in ensuring that the XML can live long into the future?

Or is there more to it than using XML? How can we best ensure that our data, all our data, and its semantics survive this year, next year, ten years? into the next millennium? Commercial information may have a useful lifetime measured in years or decades; cultural-heritage material, scientific data, governmental data, and historical documents need to be preserved for centuries; information about nuclear waste products will remain relevant for hundreds of millennia. It‘s not enough for the bits to survive; the meaning of the information needs to survive as well. What are we doing and what should we be doing to help its survival?

This one-day symposium will bring together researchers, government analysts, archivists, preservationists, librarians, and XML practitioners to discuss the problems and challenges of deep time document encoding. What is being done now and what more we can do?

Schedule

8:00 Breakfast
8:00 Registration - Mezzanine Level outside Mont Blanc
9:00 A brief history of markup of social science data: from punched cards to “the life cycle” approach Laine Ruus
9:45 Sustainability of linguistic resources revisited Georg Rehm, Oliver Schonefeld, Thorsten Trippel, & Andreas Witt
10:30 Break
11:00 Report from the field: PubMed Central, an XML-based archive of life science journal articles Jeff Beck
11:45 Portico: A case study in the use of XML for the long-term preservation of digital artifacts Sheila Morrissey, John Meyer, Sushil Bhattarai, Sachin Kurdikar, Jie Ling, Matthew Stoeffler, & Umadevi Thanneeru
12:30 Lunch
2:00 The Sustainability of the Scholarly Edition in a Digital World Cathy Moran Hajo
2:30 A formal approach to XML semantics: implications for archive standards Andrew Dombrowski & Quinn Dombrowski
3:00 Metadata for long term preservation of product data Joshua Lubell
3:30 Break
4:00 Beyond eighteen wheels: Considerations in archiving documents represented using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Liam R. E. Quin
4:30 Open Forum
5:30 Closing

There is nothing so practical as a good theory



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