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a useful lifetime measured in years or decades; cultural-heritage material, scientific data, governmental data, and historical documents need to be preserved for centuries; information about nuclear waste products will remain relevant for hundreds of millennia.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