MadMode

Jonathan Robie said Jim made 5 or 6 points in this talk that had been obscure, at best, in earlier talks on the Semantic Web in RDF. Kurt Cagle's notes don't seem to show them.

Unfortunately, the DAWG teleconference started at 9:30 and missing it would have delayed the WG by several weeks, so I ducked out.

What jumped out at me was that primary school publishers are hot on MathML content markup for reasons of accessibility. It's good to hear that the theory that higher levels of semantic abstraction contribute to accessability plays out in practice.

I asked if XSL-FO was on the map in this world of production math workflows, but he said no, not really.

I wanted to ask what would you change about mathml if you had a time machine? but didn't find the right moment.

He had this great slide (5 of 37) showing that business data goes from narrative documents (catalogs) to transaction data (orders) and back to narrative (support docs) and that data models need to cross them.

An HL7 person asked how important is it to trace back from document to data model? which prompted me to add a slide to my talk to make the point about how GRDDL lets you get from narrative documents back to UML-like models.

I really wanted to get this overview from Eve, but I got caught in a hallway conversation or something and missed it. I picked up some of how Liberty works from the next talk. ID-FF looks an awful lot like OpenID. I wonder what's the difference.

This showed real-world deployment of federated identity services remarkably like the ones we discuss in the PAW project. I asked a lot of questions about the details, and the answers were quite reasonable. Afterward, I said to Eve and Yvonne, Would you slow down? We're trying to pitch many of these ideas to research funders. If you deploy them all in commercial settings, where will we be? ;-)

At some point, she mentioned government rules where authorization data was considered sensitive but authentication data was not. I hope to get more details about that.

I heard this was a great talk; both the content and the presentation. I hope to get notes from Norm, Michael, and others who were there.

Most of the stuff he presented looked familiar; looks like not much has changed since the last time I saw Joe give a talk on the Atom protocol. He mentioned great article by Udell on URIs... ah... Tangled in the threads seems to be a column that Udell used to write for Byte. Anybody got a pointer to the article Joe was talking about? I'd like to cite it among the TAG educational materials.

I think Henry alluded to this paper in a TAG discussion of XMLVersioning-41 in Edinburgh. I was looking forward to getting it presented conference-style, but I guess I can read the paper and discuss it in the TAG.

John Boyer is an XForms WG co-chair, as well as doing DSig stuff. He's now at IBM, since they acquired Pure Edge. Hendler got the two of us together in the hall to discuss some connection between XForms and SPARQL... something about using XForms in the role that XSLT plays in handling SPARQL results. Hmm.

John asked that we "don't think of a Form as just the typical name/address or pizza order form"; likewise, he asked us to put aside our notion of table. But I didn't get a firm feel for what we're supposed to put in thier places, except that a form can be a blackjack game.