I've just finished the mammoth task of allotting reviewers to presentation
proposals for XML Europe 2004. It's the
third year that I've chaired this conference, and each year the
submissions provide an interesting snapshot of the XML zeitgeist.
So what's new this year?
- Government use of XML continues to rise. National and local
governance provides exactly the sort of problems that XML's
interoperability benefits address. I suspect additionally
that the economic downturn may be at play here:
government work provides reliable income for consultants, whereas
private organisations may be cutting back.
- A renewed interest in the core of XML. Over the last few years
the W3C monopolised the core development of XML (not necessarily a
bad thing, but maybe it went on too long). They've pulled
back from this now, and there's lots of life and ideas around
core technologies now the whole show isn't quite so politicised.
- The coming of age of ebXML. Ignored by many players,
ebXML seems to be showing promise now. We're getting
talks based on implementations, not just on specifications.
- The coming of age of topic maps. Long the subject of controversy and
head-scratching, topic maps technology is coming out of the specification
stage and into practical implementations. In the XML world there is a divide
between topic maps and RDF, though it is much less contentious than it used
to be. We hope to be hosting a workshop at XML Europe in which these issues
can be addressed.
What's not so hot this year?
- Graphics. For some reason, despite the hoardes of publishing types
that come to XML Europe, graphics has always remained somewhat on the
margin of the conference. Now the SVG Open conference exists, perhaps
this drags presentations away, but I don't think it's the only reason.
The lack of graphics-focused presentations is disappointing.
- Databases. Though there's a reasonable amount of interest in the W3C XML
Query language, there's not much to say about XML and databases. It
doesn't seem to me that the integration of XML with relational databases
has taken off in the way we once thought it might.
All in all, I've been impressed with the quality of the submissions. We've had much fewer proposals that need to be weeded out because
they're marketing fluff. The proposals related to web services also seem to be
improving in their quality: less of the ridiculous vision thing and a bit more
about problem-solving.
That's not it for proposals, however. We have a late-breaking
news and product
presentation deadline of 12 March.
I'll be looking to drum up trade for these presentation slots over the next
six weeks. In particular, if you're doing new work in graphics- or
weblog-related fields, please consider a submission.