Productive conference, forging relationships, etc.

Thanked Pam Genussa for her efforts, and program committee for their help.

Nocturnes

• ICE and PRISM
• Tao of Topic Maps
• Concurrent Markup in SGML/XML

Where we are

• Four years on from XML 1.0
• Achieved a great deal, more than expected
• XML very widespread, set-top boxes, digital TVs, on university courses

"SGML on the Web" is more than originally conceived.

Part of successes is about agreement -- starts from syntax agreements, but grows from there to vocabularies, standards groups and tools/languages.

Described it as "infectious" -- more groups want to reap the same advantages.

Bottom-up agreement (syntax/tools) allows parallel paths to be followed. Choices aren't restricted. But room for agreement once experiences have been won.

Encouraged conference members to take opportunities to network.

Past the hype bubble -- which was expecting instant results -- to a more long term view:

• XML and document technologies are long-term projects
• agreement takes time to reach (XSD as an example) -- practical aspects but also personalities and politics.
• new possibilities -- emergence of new uses. e.g uses to which XSLT has been put .

What's next?

Core is done, so where do we go next?

Some benefits still haven't been reaped yet.

Next layers:

• electronic business, e.g ebXML -- needs to build on past experience, not just angle-brackets. Web services is next hype bubble -- but it too is a long-term project. Security, privacy. Do e-business in a fault-tolerant ('webby', real-word) way.
• semantic web -- TimBL brain-child. Personally excited about machine processable web. Achieve enough agreement at the lower levels to allow a machine to carry out some tasks. Not different to e-business, but what happens when "automate the business of living your life"
• key: vocabularies and ontologies

challenges: all users of XML must be catered for. Standards groups are very driven by needs of their members. Encouraged by number of standards groups with different focusses.

Suggested on topic: authoring. interoperable documents. writing docs is a technical activity -- XML, valid HTML not as prevalent on the web as necessary. SVG "really is XML on the web, but it's graphics". Writing an XML document is more like programming than writing.

Another suggestion: intellectual property. Standards can be manipulated. Couple of unfortunate cases over last few years. Debate is happening. cf: W3C royalty free licensing.

Highlights

• top experts
• cutting-edge work
• vendors