XTech 2006: “Building Web 2.0” — 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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Tuesday May 16
09:00
Tutorial
St. John 1
Priscilla Walmsley (Datypic)
This tutorial will provide a detailed technical introduction to both XQuery 1.0 and XSLT 2.0, and their shared language XPath 2.0. The XQuery section will provide attendees with a solid understanding of the syntax of XQuery expressions. The discussion of
Ajax day
St. John 2
Simon Willison (Yahoo!)
The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls,
written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web
applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and Ajax.
Tutorial
Volmer 1
Matt Biddulph (hackdiary), Edd Dumbill (Useful Information Company)
Ruby on Rails is a framework for rapidly and elegantly developing database-backed web applications. This tutorial provides an overview of all Rails features, from AJAX to Apache, demonstrating how development time can be significantly reduced.
Tutorial
Volmer 3
Brian Suda (n/a), Ryan King (Technorati, Inc.)
We'll walk attendees through how to implement and publish microformats and long the way explain the princples and practices we've discovered while developing microformats.
09:45
Ajax day
St. John 2
Andy Smith (anarkystic.com)
Ajax is one step along the path of improved user experience, but it's not yet certain the future will be build on open standards. Find out why this matters to you, your users, and what the Dojo Foundation is doing about it.
10:30
Break
(30 mins)
11:00
Ajax day
St. John 2
Max Carlson (OpenLaszlo.org)
This paper discusses the upcoming plans for OpenLaszlo and how they relate to the Ajax community at large. It includes an overview of the language, a demo of the current Ajax support, and talks about the future of OpenLaszlo as a platform.
11:45
Ajax day
St. John 2
Jeremy Keith (Clearleft)
Ajax is hot topic. Behind the hype lies a technology that can greatly enhance websites. Those enhancements can and should degrade gracefully. By applying the principle of progressive enhancement, you can ensure that no visitor is left behind.
12:30
Break
(90 mins)
14:00
Ajax day
St. John 2
Sebastian Schürmann (Mayflower / Thinkphp)
This talk describes the daily experience of developing an Ajax Framework and Applications for Sixt Car Rental in XUL and Javascript. It will give you an insight in the practical lessons we learned in the last 2 Years.
Tutorial
Volmer 3
Steven Pemberton (W3C/CWI)
XHTML2 gives improved usability, accessibility, structuring, internationalization, device independence, integration with the semantic web, and better forms processing. The speaker is the chair of the W3C groups producing the technologies.
14:45
15:30
Break
(30 mins)
16:00
Ajax day
St. John 2
Kurt Cagle (Metaphorical Web)
ECMAScript for XML provides a way to use XML as a native datatype, and is being adopted by most major players in the industry. Join Kurt Cagle as he explores how the use of AJAX and E4X together will simplify programming web applications.
16:45
Ajax day
St. John 2
Menno van Slooten (Backbase)
Ajax developers are relying heavily on JavaScript to make web interfaces richer. But JavaScript has drawbacks. XML technologies such as XPath and XSLT are a great alternative and can be used efficiently for managing Ajax-style interactivity.
17:30
Ajax day
St. John 2
Simon Willison (Yahoo!)
Rapid-fire demonstrations of Ajax projects and concepts, chaired by Simon Willison of Yahoo!
Wednesday May 17
09:00
Grand Ballroom
Paul Graham (Y Combinator)
Startups are largely an American phenomenon. Why? What is it about America that makes startups work there? Could Silicon Valley be replicated in another country?
09:45
Grand Ballroom
Jeffrey McManus (Yahoo!)
The Web is moving from a static, one-to-many model to a participatory,
user-centric model, based on user-generated content, social networks and
two-way conversations.
10:30
Break
(30 mins)
11:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Matt Biddulph (hackdiary)
This session will explore the work that went into converting the BBC's programme catalogue database from an internal green-screen application into a public Web 2.0 application using Ruby on Rails.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Jim Melton (Oracle Corporation)
Yet Another Query Language?
Am RDF query language, SPARQL, is emerging. Is XQuery sufficient for querying RDF in its XML incarnation? Is SQL adequate to query RDF in tuple form? We explore these issues and position the 3 languages.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Robert Sayre (IconNicholson)
This presentation will discuss improvements in browser handling of syndication feeds (Atom/RSS), and cover strategies for better integration with helper applications and online services.
Open data
St. John 2
Steve Coast (openstreetmap.org)
OpenStreetMap is creating a free geowiki of the world, primarily street maps at present. Why? Geodata generally isn't free or available.
11:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Leon Katsnelson (IBM)
IBM database team (builders of DB2, Informix, and Apache Derby) have fallen in love with Ruby on Rails, XML and Web 2.0. Come to this session to learn about the projects we have under way and what this can do for Ruby on Rails and Web 2.0 enthusiasts.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Michael Kay (Saxonica Limited)
This session surveys the strengths and weaknesses of the XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 languages when it comes to writing real-life, sizeable applications for performing data transformations.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Myk Melez (Mozilla Corporation)
Microsummaries are regularly-updated compilations of the most important and timely information on web pages. This talk demonstrates how Firefox will incorporate microsummaries into its UI, starting with bookmark labels
Open data
St. John 2
Di-Ann Eisnor (Platial Inc.)
Platial is an initiative to create a collaborative atlas that bridges people, neighborhoods and nations and enables people to document experience through geography. When geography can viewed through the eyes of many, geopolitical boundaries begin to melt.
12:30
Break
(90 mins)
14:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Mark Nottingham (Yahoo! Inc)
Web caching hasn't significantly changed in years, and many believe it's a casualty of a more dynamic, real-time "Web 2.0". That doesn't have to be the case. This session shows what's possible right now, and examines the future of HTTP caching.
Core technologies
St. John 1
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)), Eric Miller (World Wide Web Consortium)
Future-proofing your data requires not only that
it be possible to parse it reliably in the future
-- you also have to be able to understand it. XML
helps future proof the syntax of your data; can we
future-proof the semantics, too? How?
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Jonas Sicking (Mozilla Corporation)
As CSS allows stylistic attributes to be added to elements, so XBL allows behavior to be added. This talk describes the capabilities of XBL and explains what is new in XBL2.
Open data
St. John 2
Roland Alton-Scheidl (PUBLIC VOICE Lab & Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences)
StreamOnTheFly is an open source and open content media network, fed by community radio stations, which allows easy exchange of content for broadcasting and podCasting.
14:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Ralph Meijer (Jabber Software Foundation)
Jabber, based on the IETF approved Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
(XMPP), is a streaming XML technology. This session discusses the
publish-subscribe extensions of Jabber and their applications, like Atom-over-XMPP and Extended presence.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Daniel Parker (Economic Technology, Inc.)
As XML technologies make gains in mainstream data processing, the need grows for markup languages that convert legacy data to XML. This presentation identifies use cases for flat-XML conversion, and describes a markup vocabulary that addresses them.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Benjamin Smedberg (Mozilla Corporation)
This presentation will demonstrate the convergence of rich-client and web application development and discuss application deployment using Mozilla XULRunner.
Open data
St. John 2
Tom Loosemore (BBC New Media)
The Internet is not the only source of open data. This session will look at what happens when you realise that Digital Broadcasts are just nicely structured APIs. It will include demos of some internal BBC prototypes.
15:30
Break
(30 mins)
16:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Parand Darugar (Yahoo Inc.)
This session will discuss the uses of XML, REST and SOAP at Yahoo!, focusing on real-life lessons learned from extensive usage over the past 5+ years in Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Frank Mantek (Google)
Google recently released the Google Data API, an Atom based protocol to retrieve, query and update data on Google properties. The talk discusses the protocol and libraries, together with sample code, as well as the planned future of the API.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Vladimir Vukićević (Mozilla Corporation)
This presentation will examine some of the strengths and weaknesses of the HTML 'canvas' and SVG for adding rich graphical capabilities to web applications. Future browser graphics capabilities, both 2D and 3D will also be discuss.
Open data
St. John 2
Tristan Ferne (BBC Radio & Music)
A BBC Radio project developing a wiki-like interface for collaboratively chopping up radio programmes into segments and annotating and tagging each segment.
16:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Ben Watson (Adobe)
Explaining how Rich Internet Applications enable developers and architects to build enterprise Web 2.0 applications by leveraging existing J2EE backend infrastructures and development metaphors.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Henry Thompson (University of Edinburgh)
W3C XML Schema allows numerical occurrence ranges in content models, to e.g. allow between 2 and 10 of some element. A new approach to implementing such models is described which is time- and space-efficient, even when such ranges are nested.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
David Baron (Mozilla Corporation)
A discussion of problems with existing standards and potential improvements in two areas: layout systems for user interfaces (rather than documents) and mechanisms for reordering content to allow the author to use good markup and appropriate layout.
Open data
St. John 2
Steven Pemberton (W3C/CWI)
This talk discusses the requirements for Web Applications, and the underpinnings necessary to make Web Applications follow in the same spirit that engendered the Web in the first place.
Thursday May 18
09:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Paul Prescod (Justsystems Inc.)
Interested in DITA, the XML-based standard for written communication? This presentation, based on an actual case study, looks at the planning and development tasks that are required to implement a DITA authoring solution.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Robin Berjon (Expway)
Efficient XML has been the topic of heated discussion in the XML community, and while things are quieter today much remains to be debated now that the W3C is working on a format. This talk will cover the past, present, and future of efficient XML.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Ian McKellar (Flock Inc)
This session will present the user interface of the Flock web browser and describe how the project is attempting to update the browser experience to enable sharing, collaboration and publishing.
Open data
St. John 2
Suw Charman (Open Rights Group)
Our digital selves are being increasingly surveilled, tracked and controlled by government and business alike, while our rights to privacy and free speech are eroded. What are the most worrying threats, and how you can protect your digital rights?
09:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Sean Scannell (eXiMaL Limited)
Case Study of an implementation of XML authoring in the Open University. Whilst Case Studies sometimes identify non-transferable experience, this contains practical information beneficial in guiding any organisation in the introduction of XML authoring.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Stefan Letz (IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH), Roland Seiffert (IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH)
This presentation describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a high-performance XML parser on the Cell Broadband Engine processor architecture as a part of a system architecture for XML offload and acceleration.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Daniel GLAZMAN (Disruptive Innovations)
Presentation of the new wysiwyg XML editor based on Gecko, and its underlying implementation of RELAX NG.
Open data
St. John 2
Paul Hammond (BBC)
Open data is not a panacea, and presents as many questions as answers. Technology can only solve some of these issues, this presentation outlines some of the other, more fundamental, problems.
10:30
Break
(30 mins)
11:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Salvador Ledezma (IBM)
This session will focus on a data access and persistence XML model and API that allows programmers to develop simple web applications that require a database.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Leigh Dodds (Ingenta)
This paper will review the SPARQL specifications and its potential benefits to Web 2.0 applications. Focusing on the SPARQL protocol for RDF, the paper will provide implementation guidance for developers interested in adding SPARQL support to their APIs.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Mark Birbeck (x-port.net Ltd.)
From calendar controls to sliders to maps, the end-user experience is vastly improved if different types of data have different user interfaces. This session shows how XBL, SVG and XForms can be used to produce powerful widgets.
Open data
St. John 2
Tom Coates (Yahoo!)
What are the architectural elements of the emerging web of data; how do you build services to thrive in this environment? What needs to change and what needs to return to fundamental principles? How do we bring it all together to make something awesome?
11:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
David Megginson (Megginson Technologies Ltd.)
How far can a PHP-driven web application get using XML files instead of a database? This presentation looks at an ongoing experiment using REST both outside and inside a web application, discussing the pros and cons of XML as a dynamic storage medium.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Eric Prud'hommeaux (W3C/ERCIM)
SPARSQL gives existing MySQL clients (PHP, DBI, ODBC, JDBC) RDF query access to MySQL databases. Learn how SPARQL support in MySQL provides the efficiency of relational databases with the versatility of RDF query.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Thomas Meinike (Merseburg University of Applied Sciences / Department Computer Science and Communication Systems)
Mozilla Firefox 1.5 came out including a native SVG implementation. In the context of other technologies like JavaScript, XML and XSLT it’s possible to create graphical content on the fly. Basic facts and practical know-how will be presented.
Open data
St. John 2
Thomas Vander Wal (InfoCloud Solutions, Inc.)
Thomas will explain his Model of Attraction, to frame the constraints of developing across devices and platforms. He will use his Personal InfoCloud to frame digital information convergence for the person so to design our information for use and reuse.
12:30
Break
(90 mins)
14:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Brendan Quinn (BBC)
To meet the BBC's requirements for content model management, we built an OWL ontology in Protégé. Users of the tool can export content models to our CMS from the underlying RDF. Issues include applying the open-world model to closed-world problems.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Katie Portwin (Ingenta plc), Priya Parvatikar (Ingenta plc)
The paper will focus on the practical challenges involved in creating and maintaining a very large triple store. Our repository contains bibliographic metadata spanning 17 million articles; it has 200 million triples from a range of vocabularies.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Ryan King (Technorati, Inc.)
An overview of Microformats and how they can be enable able publishing data for the Semantic Web.
Open data
St. John 2
Marc de Graauw (Marc de Graauw IT)
XML-based open standard vocabularies are rapidly developing in - not across - many vertical domains. Where is the common ground, and what can be gained by standardization? What works and what doesn't in building vocabularies?
14:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Benoît Marchal (Pineapplesoft)
The session will discuss the use of UML modeling for XML applications, including the pros and cons, practical steps, implementation strategy and project samples.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Bradley Bebee (SAIC), Bijan Parsia (Clark & Parsia, LLC), Bryan Thompson (SAIC), Michael Personick (SAIC), Martyn Cutcher (Cut the Crap Software)
High performance databases are required to support the semantic alignment and query of RDF data. We will present on a new high performance open-source RDFS store based on a Generic Object Model and its application to federate and query RDF data.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Mark Birbeck (x-port.net Ltd.)
RDF/A is a new, and simpler, way of adding metadata to documents, in such a way that the document contains its own metadata--making it easy to turn a home page into a FoaF file or RSS feed.
Open data
St. John 2
Donna Benjamin (Open Source Industry Australia)
The National Archive of Australia was one of the first govt agencies in the world to adopt XML formats for the digital preservation of documents. This presentation examines Australia's part in the Open Source, Open Data, OpenDocument ecosphere.
15:30
Break
(30 mins)
16:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Tim Finin (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
Software agents will need specialized search engines to find relevant
and trustworthy knowledge on the Semantic Web. We discuss the
underlying requirements and OWL and present Swoogle, a crawler-based
indexing and retrieval engine for RDF documents.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Description of a new markup vocabulary called "Internationalization Tag Set" (ITS), which is used for Internationalization and Localization of XML documents and schemas.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Dean Jackson (W3C)
The W3C Rich Web Client Activity will describe its objectives and
current status, and request community feedback.
Open data
St. John 2
Ben Lund (Nature Publishing Group)
This presentation describes Connotea, an experimental service that marries social bookmarking and tagging with existing academic information tools. It also highlights a challenge - how best to link web resources to data about those resources.
16:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
A discussion of the ways in which NASA is using Semantic Web technologies like RDF and OWL to get a handle on its very complex data problem.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Werner Donné (Independent consultant)
Presentation of a system for publishing the European Combined Nomenclature legislation in twenty languages.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Erik Bruchez (Orbeon, Inc.)
In this presentation, we show how today's hybrid, Ajax-based XForms implementations fit into the "Web 2.0" landscape by delivering exciting features beyond the initial promises of XForms and providing an alternative to low-level Ajax development.
Open data
St. John 2
Liz Turner (None)
A look at ways of enriching user experience of complex data sets, through taxonomy, visualization, imagery and interaction
Friday May 19
09:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Yoz Grahame (Ning, Inc.)
The Ning Playground provides excellent, free opportunities for those looking to design, develop or host new social applications and web services. This session covers Ning's many features for developers of new and existing apps.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Uche Ogbuji (Fourthought, Inc.)
Variant XML formats within a domain are often similar core models with superficial differences in representation. Advanced XML design practices allow a common model to govern multiple syntactic forms.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Michael Smith (Opera Software)
Mobile web browers have in the past lacked the support needed for enabling use of so-called "rich Internet applications" on mobile handsets. But the "next generatation" of mobile web browsers has changed that, dramatically.
Open data
St. John 2
Ian Davis (Talis Information Ltd.)
Embedded RDF is a pattern for enriching content by interweaving existing XHTML markup with RDF. The method used requires no new markup so the XHTML can still be validated, is fully CSS compliant and will not affect browser behaviour.
09:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Simon Willison (Yahoo!)
Django is a full-stack Python web framework initially created to handle the challenges posed by a fast-moving newsroom environment. It has gained a strong community following in the ten months since its release as an open-source project.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Eric van der Vlist (DYOMEDEA)
Treebind is a generic Java Open Source API which binds a number of different hierarchical and graphs data model (XML, RDF, LDAP and Java objects are currently supported). This presentation is also a unique opportunity to compare these data models.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Håkon Lie (Opera Software)
The web is shifting from being document-centric to being application-centric. This presentation will describe the opportunities and challenges in running Web applications on mobile devices.
Open data
St. John 2
Mikel Maron (OpenStreetMap)
With the huge potential of GeoRSS to leverage the "RSS Ecosystem" for the Geospatial Web, GeoRSS.org was created with the goals of promoting interoperability, upwards compatibility with GML, and extending W3C geo for line and polygon geometries.
10:30
Break
(30 mins)
11:00
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Dave Raggett (W3C)
Web-based editor and slide presentation tool
using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript
Core technologies
St. John 1
Oleg Parashchenko (Saint-Petersburg State University)
XSLT has roots in DSSSL. DSSSL has roots in the Lisp dialect Scheme. Now, XSieve interweaves both XSLT and Scheme, forming a more powerful XML processing language. XSieve is one of the successful Google "Summer of Code" 2005 projects.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Andrei Popescu (Nokia Research Center, Nokia Corporation), Roland Geisler (Nokia), Elina Vartiainen (Nokia Research Center, Nokia Corporation)
Mini Map is a new Web page visualization method for Web browsers running on mobile phones. It preserves the original look and feel of the page, while providing means for efficiently navigating to the interesting content.
Open data
St. John 2
David Beckett (Yahoo! Inc)
This paper will discuss tagging unplugged from the tagging services
that build them using a series of RDF models to ask 'What is imporant
about a tag?' and providing ways to go from the tags to what people
think they are about.
11:45
Applications
Grand Ballroom
Jeff Barr (Amazon)
Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr reviews Amazon’s web services, including Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon E-Commerce Service, Alexa Web Information Service, and Alexa Web Search Platform.
Core technologies
St. John 1
Yukihiko Negoro (Justsystems Inc.)
In this presentation, we will show how xfy and IBM DB2 Viper can implement UltraRAD for XML applications, and change and accelerate utilization of information in companies.
Browser technology
Foyer Room
Peter Ferne (Mista)
Sharing Places is a Web 2.0 application which enables and encourages
users to combine GPS tracks, text, photo, video and audio annotations
to author digital mediascapes, tag them and publish them for others
to find, remix and share.
Open data
St. John 2
Michael Leventhal (Tarari, Inc.)
Does application-aware networking threaten the "open internet" - where every message is handled equally? Ironically, the very power unleased by exchanging XML on the internet threatens, in the eyes of some, Web 2.0 goals of openness and innovation.
12:30
Break
(90 mins)
14:00
Grand Ballroom
Jeff Barr (Amazon)
What if computers could make use of people? Jeff Barr will explain how the Amazon Mechanical Turk API does this, allowing computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans.
14:45
Grand Ballroom
Brendan Eich (Mozilla Corporation)
JavaScript 2 will be finalised in 2007. To help migration an open source JS2-to-JS compiler is being developed, making JS2 a reality in 2006. Work on this compiler and the new features of JS2 will be presented by the inventor of JavaScript.