Forthcoming XML UK Meetings

One of the oldest and most prolific XML Conference hosts have been the Graphic Communication Associates (GCA). Beginning in 1998 and continuing as a GCA event up to the year 2006. GCA later renamed itself as IdeAlliance and continued to host conferences. GCA/IdeAlliance are for and focused on participants, industries in the field of print and electronic industries. Their first conference was held in 1999 and the latest one which was held this December 2007. IdeAlliance conferences are well attended and have a high level of technical content, leading industry participants, sponsors and attendees. One normally finds a high level of acceptance of products and technology, which have been showcased at the IdeAlliance Conferences. It is often said the 1999 Conference was the most well attended conference ever.

Chris Sells used to organize and manage the Applied XML Developers conference. The last conference he hosted was the year he joined Microsoft, it was the Applied XML Developers Conference 5 in 2004. See this link for some interesting feedback on this conference. There have been other conferences but none of them has had much impact as have IdeAllince and then Chris Sells Conferences.

Just to make it interesting here are two quotes from the article to tell you how the wind was blowing during the conference. “Sam Ruby, Senior Technical Staff Member in the Emerging Technologies group at IBM, spent 45 minutes showing other experts how “the standards don’t reflect reality; reality has moved on,” particularly in regard to Unicode. Even when default encodings for HTML, XML, and Microsoft encodings are different, and XML Namespaces requires that the URI examples be considered distinct, System.Uri.Equals may return “true”.

While not every aspect of XML is judged to be a potential disaster — far from it. Two presentations have demonstrated how XML is enabling solutions in the real world: one from the U.S. Department of Defense on using XML for Navy Missile Systems, and a presentation from Corillian’s Scott Hanselman and Patrick Cauldwell about effectively using XML in financial systems.

IdeAlliance managed and hosted the XML Conference in 2007 which as usual was a terrific success. Some of the other Conferences of Note in the immediate past were:

• Extreme Markup Languages 2005. August 1 – 5, 2005. Best Western Europa-Downtown, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
• XTech 2005. “XML, the Web and Beyond.” May 24 – 27, 2005. Amsterdam, Netherlands.
• OASIS Symposium 2005. “The Future of XML Vocabularies.” April 24 – 29, 2005. New Orleans Marriott, New Orleans, LA, USA.
• XML 2004 Conference and Exposition. “XML: From Syntax to Solutions.” November 15 – 19, 2004. Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, D.C., USA.
• Extreme Markup Languages 2004. August 2 – 6, 2004. Hotel Europa, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
• OASIS Symposium on Reliable Infrastructures for XML. April 26 – 29, 2004. New Orleans Marriott, 555 Canal Street, New Orleans, LA, USA.
• XML 2003 Conference and Exposition. “Now We’re Cooking”. December 7 – 12, 2003. Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
• XML UK Topic Maps Seminar. “Real World Topic Maps: How to Manage Knowledge and Address the Challenge of Infoglut.” November 5, 2003. Duxford Officers’ Mess, Duxford, Cambridge, UK.
• 2003 ACM Workshop on XML Security. October 31, 2003. George W. Johnson Center, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA.
• XML Asia 2003. “XML: Empowering Economies.” October 6 – 7, 2003. Seoul, Korea.
• OASIS Open Standards Conference 2003. October 1 – 3, 2003. Grace Hotel, Sydney, Australia.
• Web Services Edge West 2003. September 30 – October 2, 2003. Santa Clara, California, USA.
• Washington Area SGML/XML Users Group XML Authoring/Editing Forum. September 29, 2003. Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., McLean, Virginia, USA.
• W3C Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets. September 24 – 26, 2003. Santa Clara, California, USA.

Looking forward in this year, the largest XML Conference is slated for Dec 2008, from 8 to 10, to be held at Crystal City Virginia USA. This will be the largest conference event of the year and is probably the most influential conference.