Balisage Series on Markup Technologies

ISSN 1947-2609

Volume 22: Proceedings of the Symposium on Markup Vocabulary Ecosystems

ISBN-13 978-1-935958-17-8

Symposium on Markup Vocabulary Ecosystems

Washington, DC

July 30, 2018


Chair: Jeff Beck

Successful shared markup vocabularies (tag sets, document types, schemas, call them what you will), far from being just lists of tags, are the centers of complex ecosystems that support documentation activities while drawing support from both user communities and vendors. A complex ecosystem supports and is supported by these vocabularies. People spend significant time, energy, and money to create, adapt, adopt, modify, maintain, and promulgate the tag set. Users buy and customize tools to create and use content tagged to it and change their processes and tune their requirements to the (often only implied) world view behind the tag set. Vendors specialize in it.

Each vocabulary ecosystem is different, and yet they seem to have common features:

In this symposium we will discuss the features of markup vocabulary ecosystems, how to nurture them, and how strategies to support some vocabularies might be useful to the communities that surround other markup vocabularies. Our focus is on the ways in which we create and support shared vocabularies, not on any particular tag set, so examples from DITA, DocBook, NIEM, HTML, JATS, HL7, OOXML, PRISM, UBL, TEI, or any of the other thousands of public or private shared markup vocabularies are in scope for this discussion.

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