Balisage is an annual conference devoted to descriptive markup, how to use it to best effect, and what it means for technology, access to information, and the preservation of information for the future.

Specific topics discussed vary over time, but the main themes of the conference consistently include:

• markup languages, most visibly XML and SGML and proposals to extend or replace them, but also including other ways of structuring information
• tools for processing marked-up documents
• tools and practices for converting documents and other information from one format to another
• systems and tools for managing changes in documents over time and space
• experience reports from users and implementers
• programming languages for writing tools for processing marked up data
• issues relating to the theory of documents and markup
• specific technologies related to any or all of the above: XML parsers, XSLT, XQuery, XPath, XForms, Invisible XML, XML editors, ...

We bring together people from a broad cross-section of those concerned with markup, from users who want to preserve their investment in information and make better use of their information, through to technical staff who design and manage complex information workflows, and to philosophers pondering the nature of documents and the meaning of the speech acts embedded in markup. Talks tend to be unabashedly technical.

If you work with markup or marked up data and want to learn from others who also do so, Balisage is for you.

The 2024 Program

The program for 2024 includes talks on:

• using XML and invisible XML to preserve and manage technical alerts originally handled by a mainframe computer now being decommissioned
• finding and using good representations of textual variation and textual alignment
• the new international standard Graph Query Language
• creating consistent collections of marked up documents
• applying invisible XML to parse and process scripts for managing nuclear resonance imaging equipment
• tips for creating useful MathML
• an important design pattern for XPath-based processing
• designing an input language to control the generation art and craft patterns with iXML
• using XPath functionality in unexpected ways to support testing of XSLT transformations
• using XML processing tools to process invisible-XML grammars
• deploying large language models to mark up text and process marked up text

People involved with Balisage

The people making Balisage include markup theoreticians and practitioners, data modelers, designers, architects, and both aficionados and deep thinkers. We work as software developers, system architects, academics, integrators, librarians, data miners, lexicographers, archivists, document managers, standards developers, programmers, and publishers.

Conference Committee

Chair

B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies

Co-Chairs

Deborah A. Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies

James David Mason

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies

Norman Walsh, Saxonica

Advisory Board

Syd Bauman, Northeastern University · Jeff Beck, National Library of Medicine · David J Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh · Jon Bosak · Robin Cover, OASIS · Steve DeRose, Independent Consultant · Bob DuCharme, CCRi · Patrick Durusau · Eric Freese, TopQuadrant · Eduardo Gutentag · G. Ken Holman, Crane Softwrights · Sam Hunting · Michael Kay, Saxonica · David A. Lee, Nexstra, Inc · Chris Lilley, World Wide Web Consortium · Yves Marcoux, Université de Montréal · Sean McGrath, Propylon · Mary McRae, Orbis Technologies · Steven R. Newcomb, Coolheads Consulting · Wendell Piez, Piez Consulting Services · Ari Nordström, Creative Words · Liam Quin, Delightful Computing · Allen H. Renear, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · Jeni Tennison, Jeni Tennison Consulting · Henry S. Thompson, University of Edinburgh · Fabio Vitali, University of Bologna · Lauren Wood