.:: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 >

Time: ::. 11:15 to 12:00 >

· The foundations of the internet
· The role of open source and standards
· Tthe future direction for the way computers and the internet are used
· The way wireless technology will evolve
· The mechanisms that individuals and corporations will need to employ to join and make the most of this future direction.
Expect energy, humour, insight and perhaps a little controversy.

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>>Joseph Gollner
XIA Corporation ::.

::. General Session>>

Time: ::. 8:30 to 9:15 >

Everything can be seen from different perspectives. XML is no different in this regard. From the perspective of those designing and developing the semantic web, XML performs a useful, even essential, role within a larger technology palate. From the perspective of information users, XML provides the ability for anyone, truly without limitation, to locate, retrieve, view and use information drawn from all manner of possible sources, and, going further, to participate actively in the larger processes at work to produce that information. Seen in a yet different way, XML provides simple way to implement complex behaviour and in so doing make it possible for the very smallest participant to compete with the largest. With reference to lessons learned from recent attempts to apply XML to the field of democratic governance, this talk will look at the role of XML in keeping the semantic web a place where anyone can participate.

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>>Edd Dumbill
Managing Editor, XML.com ::.

::. General Session>>

Time: ::. 9:15 to 10:00 >

As standards for XML communication mature, a new business architecture is emerging. The need for prior knowledge of business partners is disappearing--soon the technology will be in place to allow negotiation and transaction between organizations on an ad-hoc basis. This talk introduces this radical shift in the way electronic business is done, looks at the components of this web services architecture, including SOAP, UDDI, WSDL and ebXML, and examines the standards bodies and vendors responsible for building it. It will also outline the future of the web services model, and its relationship to the Semantic Web vision of the W3C.

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>>Henry S. Thompson
W3C ::.

::. General Session>>

Time: ::. 10:30 to 11:15 >

There is a revolution underway in the use of the World Wide Web by business, based on the use of XML as a richer and more powerful alternative to HTML. This talk will give a quick overview of the state of the XML family of standards, and then outline a vision for the WWW of the future, in which XML has become invisible to web-based applications. Client-side and server-side components of distributed systems will interact in terms of their own internal application-appropriate data, with the translation into and out of XML for communication being entirely managed by appeal to annotated XML Schemas, with no need for scripting.

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>>Vanessa Klein
International Technical Consultant, OmniMark Technologies ::.

::. Technical >>

Time: ::. 2:00 to 2:45 >

XML programmers are familiar with the tree-based parsing of the DOM and the event based parsing of SAX. The OmniMark programming language uses a third model: hierarchy based parsing. Where a SAX parser will treat the beginning of an element as one event and the end of the element as a separate event, OmniMark treats the occurrence of an element as a single event that fires a single rule. Since elements can contain nested elements, this leads to the creation of a hierarchy of fired rules. Thus the hierarchy of the document is modeled by the call stack of the program. Hierarchical parsing is based on a streaming programming model in which data is streamed from a source to a destination and processed as it flows. During parsing, data content is streamed directly to output, while output generated by user code is interpolated into the output stream. Context management is provided automatically by the hierarchy of program rule execution.

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>>Michel Vulpe
CTO and Founder, i4i ::.

<<Foundation .::

Time: ::. 2:00 to 2:45 >

XML is often described as ugly and far too complex to present to the regular user. In B2B activities where the parties are all computers, this is of little concern. Computers after all are used to working with complex and unappealing codes, in fact that is their normal way of working. Computers however have to interact with people and in that mode they have to be "user friendly". That is a difficult trick and reams of materials continuously published on this matter attest to the difficulty of the task. XML has added a new dimension to the problem by introducing a new layer of complexity to the user interface. This presentation will review strategies for attacking the problem and consider the advantages and disadvantages of each.

>>Lynne Thompson
Senior Software Engineer, Unisys Corporation ::.

>>Business ::.

>>Nick Smilonich
Director of Advanced Technology, Unisys Corporation ::.

With the number of mobile phones skyrocketing across Europe, mobile e-commerce transactions or m-commerce is hot! Forecasts from several industry analysts are impressive. This session will provide an overview of m-commerce, technical infrastructure, challenges, the players in this space, and common m-commerce applications today, tomorrow, and beyond. The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Wireless Markup Language (WML) is a markup language based on XML, and is intended for use in specifying content and user interface for cellular phones, pagers, and many mobile/wireless devices. Can HTML be used instead of WML? How do you transform HTML/XML into WML? How does XSL relate to WML?

>>Holger Doernemann
Technical Leader, Rational Software GmbH ::.

Many software development processes like the Rational Unified Process define so-called artifacts as deliverables for the software lifecycle. Such artifacts normally include specifications, models, test assets, source-code etc. When using software development tools for managing these artifacts - such as requirements management systems for instance - version control of those artifacts often becomes an essential challenge and a critical problem. While normal documents and source code can easily be managed using a revision control system, most modern tools make use of repositories and databases where data is deeply encapsulated. Quite often this means that a software project has different locations of artifacts each one having to be versioned separately, a nice source for inconsistency for the entire project. The session will give an introduction of how tool vendors try to overcome this hurdle and manage software lifecycle artifacts consistently with a single standard revision control system using XML outputs.

>>David E. Reich
Senior Software Engineer, IBM Voice Systems ::.

::. Technical >>

This session introduces VoiceXML to the developer. VoiceXML is the new standard, endorsed by the W3C, for Voice markup on the Internet. Learn how to speech enable your web sites using VoiceXML, IBM's Voice Browser, a web server and a plain old telephone. This combination of technology, architecture and tools provides a platform through which users can talk to your data and web sites through any telephone, and provides the platform upon which to expand as the power and capability of wireless devices such as PDAs and smartphones evolve with little to no change of your applications. By using your web based infrastructure, you can speech enable your e-business today with no change to your existing business logic or infrastructure and be ready for the newer devices before they arrive.

>>Scott Cahill
General Manager of International Operations, Kinecta Corporation ::.

<<Foundation .::

The skyrocketing growth of the Internet and m-commerce (mobile commerce) in Europe and the increasing amount of online and wireless information has made the types of devices that people use to access and distribute information extremely diverse and heterogeneous. As a result, many companies are in the process of making an important first step in switching to systems that output content to XML, so that content can be easily used in various media forms. This presentation will explain how the Information & Content Exchange (ICE) protocol is impacting online syndication and enabling new business models for companies in virtually any industry. It will also provide examples of how successful companies are using applications based on ICE to syndicate content today.

>>Jeroen van Rotterdam
CTO, X-Hive Corporation ::.

As the use of XML grows a standardized means of querying XML documents is required. Currently there are several ways to perform searches on collections of XML documents. All methods have their advantages and disadvantages. This session will give an overview of the various methods and give an advise on when to use which method. Keywords for this session: XPath, Extended DOM Traversal, and Context-sensitive Indexing.