What: International Workshop on Markup of Overlapping Structures

When: Monday 6 August, 2007 (9:30am - 6pm)
(the day before the Extreme conference)

Where: Hotel Europa (the Extreme conference hotel), Montréal, Canada

XML and SGML have revolutionized the representation of structured information, but not all information structures map easily into systems of hierarchically nested elements. Markup of overlapping structures is a perennially hot topic, reinvented and reimagined as often as it is solved.

This full-day workshop will bring together the proponents of some of the major proposals for markup, representation, extraction, display, and validation of semantic overlap to summarize the systems they are developing and discuss topics of common interest. A morning of formal presentations will be followed by an afternoon of free-ranging discussion.

Confirmed speakers and topics include:

• Jean Carletta, University of Edinburgh, on Mate/Nite and stand-off markup for linguistic annotation
• Steven DeRose, National Center for Biotechnology Information (National Institutes of Health), on Trojan Markup and other XML milestone-tagging techniques
• Patrick Durusau, Snowfall Software, on Topic Mapping overlap
• Wendell Piez, Mulberry Technologies, on LMNL (Layered Markup and Annotation Language)
• C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, World Wide Web Consortium, on TexMecs and Goddag structures
• Andreas Witt, University of Tübingen, on Multiple Annotations and XConcur

Overlapping structures are ubiquitous, appearing in applications of textual markup as varied as aircraft maintenance manuals and ancient scriptural and liturgical works. The "overlap issue" raises its ugly head whenever text encoding looks beyond the snapshot view of a particular hierarchy to represent and process multiple concurrent aspects of a text, including features that reflect the text's evolution across multiple versions and variants whether typographic or presentational, structural, annotational or referential, taxonomic or topical. Overlap is a problem in texts as diverse as technical documents and product manuals (versioning), legal codes (effectivity), literary works (prosadic versus dramatic stucture, rhetorical structures, annotation), sacred texts (chapter plus verse reference versus sentence structure and commentary), and language corpora (multiple layers of linguistic annotation).

While many approaches to the representation and processing of overlap and multiple concurrent hierarchies in digitally encoded text have been proposed, to date no single effort has demonstrated a general and widely replicable solution. This is a hard problem. Is a single solution possible? Is one necessary?

Registration fee: $125 per person
(20% discount for academics, IDEAlliance members, OASIS members, TEI, SC34, W3C)