[Apologies for multiple postings] This pre-conference symposium co-located with Balisage 2010 should be of interest to readers of this list. Please forward as appropriate. If you have a department bulletin board, you might print out the flyer at http://balisage.net/Handouts/LongHaulCall.pdf and put it up for others to see. I look forward to your paper proposals and your attendance! -Michael Sperberg-McQueen * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Call for Participation: 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 http://balisage.net/longhaul/ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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a useful lifetime measured in years or decades; cultural-heritage material, scientific data, governmental data, and historical documents need to be preserved for centuries; information about nuclear waste products will remain relevant for hundreds of millennia.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? We solicit papers addressing any aspect of this problem complex, including but not limited to: - Analysis of the problem: what are the requirements? - How is XML for long-term archiving different from XML for immediate processing or message interchange? - Identification of particular risk factors (with or without recommendations for managing risks) - Long-term preservation and access issues in library, commercial, governmental, or other contexts - Designing for survival - How tradeoffs in the design of markup vocabularies affect data life - Reports from the field on success or failure of specific techniques in preservation in particular fields (energy, defense, healthcare, STM journal articles, historical editions, curated scientific and scholarly data, product support and maintenance data, legislative records, etc.) - How to document the semantics of markup vocabularies so as to ensure that documents can be understood in the future - How to document and preserve application semantics - How to use XML as a wrapper around pre- or non-XML data to improve its chances of survival - The role of packaging - How to ensure that XML data remain usable even if the application environment they were built in (or for) has disappeared - Does scale change everything? Paper Submissions Paper submissions for the symposium should follow the instructions for submissions to the main Balisage 2010 conference (same format, same address, same due date). Paper submissions are due 16 April 2010. * * * * * There is nothing so practical as a good theory * * * * * -- **************************************************************** * C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC * http://www.blackmesatech.com * http://cmsmcq.com/mib * http://balisage.net ****************************************************************