Some notes from day two of the XTech conference.
A more mixed selection of talks for me yesterday:
- Directions of the Mozilla RDF engine — Axel Hecht gave a low level look at how the RDF parser and APIs in Mozilla were going to be brought up to specification and optimised. Some new APIs will appear, but backwards compatibility seems to be a primary goal
- The convergence of structure and chaos — Paul Prescod gave a talk on the benefits of using wikis in concert with content management systems
- The Application of Weblike Design to Data – Designing Data for Reuse — nice talk from Matt Biddulph on the benefits of information modelling and good URL design when designing both web sites and web services. I predict that information architecture for web services is going to be a hot topic before long; IA’s have a lot to contribute.
- SKOS: A language to describe simple knowledge structures for the web — an good introduction to SKOS from Alistair Miles; I plan to take a closer look at the vocabulary, take a look at SWED for an example of how a facetted browsing interface can be built on a SKOS dataset
- Beagle: Free and Open Desktop Search — fun talk from Jon Trowbridge. Pleased to see that Beagle is being ported to Windows
- Topic Mapping The Restoration — Kal Ahmed discussed the process involved in creating a large topic map based on Samuel Pepys’s diary. Interesting on many different levels
But the two talks that really dominated yesterday and had the halls a-buzzin’ were Steven Pemberton’s on the design principles and new features of XHTML2, and Ian Hickson’s review of the work of the WHATWG to propose extensions to HTML4 and the DOM.
