On Wed, 2011-10-12 at 12:33 -0700, Daniela Florescu wrote: > David, > > On Oct 12, 2011, at 11:51 AM, David Lee wrote: > > > Question. > > 1) What are "the other problems" with Balisage ? > > I love Balisage. But: > > - Too narrowly focused I would think. ( Looks like an old family reunion > -- which is indeed pleasant :-) > ( As an example, few people with database background > participate to it. Few people with serious IR background. Few number > of newcomers > every year, and they are not encouraged when they do)
There has been a conscious effort to welcome newcomers this year and last year. Agree that it's a fairly small community though. [...] > > I would say, the bare minimum requirements: > - publications should be copyrighted (which in XML Prague and Balisage > I am not sure they are) For Balisage, copyright remains with the authors; Balisage has authors sign a non-exclusive publication agreement. > - that has to be some official affiliation with ACM http://www.acm.org/ No XML conference has this as far as I know. > - that has to be an official and more rigurous selection process, > published > and followed ad literam. > - submissions should be more serious (not only "send us a paragraph > and we believe > you because we've been knowing you for decades") I think that's the case for Balisage - i.e. a serious peer review process that's clearly followed; I think less so for XML Prague. The problem with becoming _too_ "tenure track publishing" academic is that papers become irrelevant. This was a real problem with the WWW conferences in the early 2000s. On the subject of hiring PhD people as programmers - in general, anyone who says "ah, this problem is so-and-so's algorithm" without looking too deeply is likely to write code that implements an algorithm rather than code that solves a problem. That's OK in some circumstances (e.g. a general-purpose library) and not in others (product, consulting...) because code like a_prime := b_prime * a[j] + cos(b[j - a_j]) is impossible to maintain when requirements change. This generalises (since I'm over-generalising anyway!) to whether the person sees programming in terms of understanding and modelling an imperfect and changing world with imperfect tools, or in terms of precise black-and-white solving-a-mathematical-problem. I've had better luck with physicists than with mathematicians. > The major complaint right now for XQuery is: we have enough > implementations; yet > there are not enough programmers who know it. > > How can we get out of this if we don't teach it ? I'd very much like to see a W3C "business group" or even "community group" of people focussed on providing tutorials, training, examples, libraries - such things are supposed to be formed by interested W3C Members... ;) Where markup is taught and/or studied in universities, as far as I know it's primarily in terms of rhetoric and text studies, and as part of a tool for representation of critical editions or taxonomies or Wittgenstein's notebooks, i.e. firmly in the humanities. XML bridges the gaps between . the humanities and the study of text and rhetoric . the mathematics of annotated trees, graphs, sequences, regular grammars . the computer science of optimisation, storage, complexity theory . functional programming etc etc, a lot of interdisciplinary stuff that's really cool and interesting but that builds bridges where researchers are still busy building walls. I don't have an answer - I suspect the answer is that in fact there's a small piece of the puzzle at lots of different venues, rather than a single XQuery conference. Maybe start an ACM SIG?? Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
