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Previous MeetingsMay 16, 17:30/19:30 (5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.)Special Venue: Regional Enterprise Tower (the former Alcoa building) at 425 6th Avenue. [Map] Anthony Tomasic, e-XMLMedia: The XForms Technology. In this talk Anthony will describe XFE, the E-XMLMEDIA implementation of XFORMS. XFORMS is a new W3C standard designed to simplify forms based data entry programming. B The audience is encouraged to boo and throw popcorn for any marketing fluff in the talk. [FIRM] Debbie Edwards and David Quatchak, Agnew Moyer Smith Inc.: Putting the XML in the Xplorion. Find out how XML plays a role behind the scenes of Xplorion, an interactive "regional showcase" now open in the Regional Enterprise Tower. Xplorion features interactive user information kiosks and a sophisticated "virtual flight" theater using actual aerial footage of the region. Learn more about the role that XML plays in both visitor exhibits. [FIRM] April 17 - Joint STC MeetingThis meeting, devoted to document-oriented XML, will be a PittMark first - a joint meeting with the Pittsburgh chapter of the Society for Technical Communications. Jeff Beal, ANSYS: XML in ANSYS Document Production. Jeff will share an overview of ANSYS's completely XML-based document production cycle. From authoring to delivery, ANSYS is using XML to produce technical manuals and online help for its finite element modeling products. Bill LeRoy, USAirways, Flight Technical Operations: Taking off with XML. Find out how USAirways manages the black bag of documents airline pilots carry into the cockpit. Bill will also discuss activities of the Air Transport Association (ATA) for improving the delivery of flight operations information using XML. 18:30/19:30 (6:30-7:30 p.m.) in the Pittsburgh Technology Council offices at 2000 Technology Drive - in the Voicestream Building off Second Avenue. March 21 - Special Meeting on the Conversion ProblemDan Ketelar, ClearlyOnLine: The Dance of Small Steps Part Deux. ClearlyOnLine has developed a sophisticated process for converting RTF to XML, and in this presentation Dan will tell us how it's done. Mark Brampton Smith, Musician: From Hypercard to HyperXML. We've all heard about challenging sources for XML conversion (SQL, MIF, RTF, HTML, print streams, man pages, TeX, etc. etc.), but Hypercard scripts??? Let Mark explain.February 28: The Sixth Semi-Annual PittMark Happy HourThe semiannual PittMark Happy Hour will be held at the Church Brew Works and Restaurant, 3525 Liberty Avenue, in Lawrenceville, from 17:00 to 19:00 (5:00 to 7:00 p.m.). The Happy Hour is being sponsored by ClearlyOnline, a Pittsburgh-based XML training and consulting firm.  January 23Hal Davis, Mellon Financial: XEDI. Using knowledge from his prior consulting career, Hal will discuss XEDI, the direct XML representation of EDI. Every document in every version of X12 EDI is available in XEDI format today. Not just purchase order and invoice, but also mortgage applications, waybills, advance ship notices; every document type currently traded over EDI. Alan Houser, Group Wellesley: XML 2001: A Trip Report. Not all of us have the boondoggling skills needed to make it to Disneyland in December, but Alan does. Hearing him describe the show is the next best thing to being there. 19:00-21:00 (7:00-9:00 p.m.) in the Pittsburgh Technology Council offices at 2000 Technology Drive - in the Voicestream Building off Second Avenue. December 19 - R xml - Special Meeting on the Medical Uses of XMLBill Oberman, BodyMedia: Pervasive XML. An armband that sucks XML code out of your body and streams it to your web browser. Sound like science fiction? It's here today, and Bill's presentation will feature a demo. Ann Cecil, Interscope: XML and Medical Imaging. Digital imaging is transforming medicine. Ann will describe one way XML is being used to connect patient information with images, forming an integrated diagnostic environment. Jim Harrison, University of Pittsburgh: A DTD for Doctors. Jim has been working on a document architecture, and will present this work in progress. Dan Ketelar, ClearlyOnLine: Medical Document Publishing using XML. Want to know what its like to educate a major publisher on the benefits of XML? In this talk, Dan will concentrate on how ClearlyOnLine worked with the publisher to identify the medical information objects in the textbooks, and how they categorized and established relationships among those information objects. Catherine Smith, UPMC: Measuring XML's Impact. Catherine will discuss her doctoral dissertation, which is an information retrieval experiment evaluating the impact of XML markup on clinical documents. 19:00-21:00 (7:00-9:00 p.m.) in the Pittsburgh Technology Council offices at 2000 Technology Drive - in the Voicestream Building off Second Avenue. October 17 - Special Halloween MeetingCarlton Kelly, Ripple Effects Interactive: XML and Haunted Pennsylvania. Ripple Effects Interactive is a Web development company that has won 20 industry awards in the last year. Dealing with the wide assortment of development environments their clients use has been a challenge, and in this presentation Carlton Kelly will describe the XML-based Web management tools they have developed to help solve the problem, using the "Haunted Pennsylvania" site Ripple designed to illustrate. Damien Miller, Cometway Inc.: XML and the Information Stack. How can the "Semantic Web" be architected to allow for maximum interoperability? One idea that is gaining ground is to have a multi-layered architecture similar to a TCP/IP stack, with XML providing the lowest-level, syntactic layer. Damien Miller will discuss this architecture and its implications in this spooky presentation. This meeting will be held in the Ripple Building at 4618 Henry Street, at 18:00 (6:00 p.m.). Pizza and Halloween candy will be provided. September 18 - Special PittMark Talent ShowPlease note that this meeting has been moved to Tuesday, September 18th In a PittMark first, this evening will present a sampling of the wide variety of XML projects that are under way in Pittsburgh. This is a perfect opportunity to share notes with colleagues and see what your competitors are up to! Pamela Lougheed, TechWrite: A DTD for Browsing Computer Protocols 19:00-21:00 (7:00-9:00 p.m.) in the Pittsburgh Technology Council offices at 2000 Technology Drive - in the Voicestream Building off Second Avenue. Not subject to change, due to temporal asymetry. August 11 - 10:00/12:00 - A Saturday Morning with Michael LeventhalMichael Leventhal is an XML celebrity who is currently working on a very large scale XML-based travel industry portal for CommerceOne. Two years ago Michael achieved notoriety for his article "XSLT Considered Harmful", and in this special Saturday-morning meeting he shares his vision of lightweight native XML browsing using the DOM and CSS, and discusses his recent XML experiences. This special meeting is being sponsored by: August 15The semiannual PittMark Happy Hour will be held at the Church Brew Works and Restaurant, 3525 Liberty Avenue, in Lawrenceville, from 17:00 to 19:00 (5:00 to 7:00 p.m.). Sponsored by: July 18Alan Houser et al., XML Editors: Fact or Fiction? We have all been disappointed by the slow pace of XML editor technology. Is there any hope? Alan Houser will discuss the state of the art. Chris Harrington, Active Interface: Transforming XML into Interactive Graphical Representations Chris Harrington has formed a startup company here in Pittsburgh to develop and market a tool for doing visualization of XML data streams. In this presentation, originally given to the Pittsburgh SQL Users' Group, Chris discusses the challenges he encountered. 19:00-21:00 (7:00-9:00 p.m.) in the Pittsburgh Technology Council offices at 2000 Technology Drive - in the Voicestream Building off Second Avenue. June 20 - Special Joint PittJUG/PittMark SocialTim Bray once quipped that XML gives Java something to do. In this case, that's drinking beer and munching hors-d'oeuvres at the Gandy Dancer Saloon. Talk about synergistic technologies! May 23 - Second Anniversary Meeting - 19:00/21:00Andrew Adams, Tackling the Conversion Problem. The XMLification of the world entails a lot of data conversion, with all its attendant headaches. Whitehall Technologies has some innovative tools that can help. Plus: PittMark's Second Anniversary Party! Birthday Cake and a special door prize! Plus: Dave Mundie's Long-Delayed Presentation on XML in Software Testing and Process Documentation, as recently presented at the First International Conference on XML in Software Engineering! April 18, 19:00-21:00Celebrity DTD Death Match. Despite the importance of content-oriented markup, sometimes you just need a good old structure-oriented document type declaration. The three leading contenders are DocBook, the Text Encoding Initiative's TEI DTD's, and XHTML. In this evening of heart-pounding entertainment, they will go head to head, represented by Alan Houser, David J. Birnbaum, and Dave Mundie, respectively. Parental guidance suggested. Plus! As a special bonus, Dawn Lambeth, of the Electronic Information Network, will do a presentation of VoiceCAT - a library catalog interface developed here in town that uses XML for its middleware. March 21, 19:00-21:00The Future of Content Management Systems. "End-to-End Multichannel Content Management" was a hot buzzword at XML 2000. In this presentation, Brett Freeman, of Progressive Information Technologies in Emigsville PA, will talk about the Ten Commandments of Document Management and explain his company's vision of the future. He will also give a demonstration of T.I.M.E., one of the current crop of XML editors that work as plug-ins to Word. February 21: The Fourth Semi-Annual PittMark Happy Hour.The semiannual PittMark Happy Hour will be held at the Church Brew Works and Restaurant, 3525 Liberty Avenue, in Lawrenceville, from 17:00 to 19:00 (5:00 to 7:00 p.m.).
The Happy Hour is being sponsored by ClearlyOnline, a Pittsburgh-based XML training and consulting firm.
December 719:00 (7:00 p.m.) in the auditorium of the Software Engineering Institute, 4500 5th Avenue, in Oakland. Paul Cunningham, XML and Intelligent Agents. In theory, the next generation of the Web will allow smart 'bots to navigate and manipulate the vast sea of semantically-marked-up data that XML provides. CometWay is one of the companies working to make that vision come true, and in this talk its CTO will discuss the history of intelligent agents and the potential for lightweight Java agents to mine the semantic web. Thursday, November 2 - Special Meeting on XML and Graphics19:00 (7:00 p.m.) in the auditorium of the Software Engineering Institute, 4500 5th Avenue, in Oakland. Ed Donley, X3D: A Sneak Preview. What do you get when you cross Virtual Reality with XML? Answer: X3D. In this presentation Ed will demonstrate the use of Mathematica to generate XML-based three-dimensonal graphics. Dave Mundie, SVG: A Sneak Preview.The era of downloading 20K bitmaps just to draw a rectangle are coming to an end. The W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics language is an exciting new technology that promises to drastically lower bandwidth requirements, seamlessly blend hand-crafted and computer-generated graphics, and just generally usher in a new era of high-quality graphics on the Web. October 5, 19:00 - Special ECCNet MeetingSoftare Engineering Institute, 4500 Fith Avenue (Fifth and Craig), Oakland In this unprecedented one-woman show we will have six complete ECCNet presentations for the price of one! Betty Harvey, The Future of Interactive Electronic Training Manuals. IETM's were one of the earliest and most successful applications of SGML. Betty Harvey has been watching the impact XML is having on this industry, and will train us interactively on the subject in this presentation. Betty Harvey, Yuri and Me. Betty Harvey was well on her way to a lifetime of stodgy civil service when she met Yuri Rubinsky, the charismatic SGML evangelist from SoftQuad. Inspired by Yuri, she quit her job to embark on a career as an SGML consultant. In this talk she will reminisce on her dealings with Yuri, including the infamous "pooh pooh" speach and his untimely death. Betty Harvey, How Not to Design Business-to-Business XML Applications. ECCNet has designed a large number of business DTD's over the years, and has seen all the pitfalls. Betty gives us the top 10 mistakes people make in this insightful discussion. Betty Harvey, Beyond XML-EDI. The inherent extensibility of XML is allowing many industries to go beyond the traditional EDI application area and capture domain-specific business logic in a seamless whole. Betty Harvey has participated in a number of these standardization efforts, and shares her insights in this talk. Betty Harvey, The Wireless Encyclopedia. Where would you expect an encyclopedia designed for the wireless web to come from? Why, Sweden, of course. In this talk Betty Harvey talks about a project she did for a very special client, including her fast action with a Swedish-English dictionary, the perils of bilingual DTD development, and the night in the ice motel. Betty Harvey, Running XML Users' Groups. ECCNet has sponsored the Washington area SGML/XML users' group since 1995. She passes on her wisdom to PittMark in this tale of a parallel organization. September 6 - Special Meeting on XML and Databases19:00-21:00 (7:00-9:00 p.m.), Hillman Library, Room 272, on the University of Pittsburgh campus.John Nestor, XML and Databases Go Head-to-Head. For a recent project, XML For All was required to maintain the same information in both a relational database and an XML document system. The XML system proved far easier to work with, and in this talk John will explain why. Ed Wolfe, The Tamino Factor. Everyone is struggling to overcome the impedence mismatch between relational databases and XML. Treehouse's Tamino system takes a novel approach to unifying the two: "Don't!" Instead, optimal storage representations are used for each type of data, and the unification is done at the user level. August 2Semi-annual Happy Hour. Church Brew Works and Restaurant, 3525 Liberty Avenue, in Lawrenceville, 16:30-18:30 (4:30-6:30 p.m.). Sponsored by Treehouse Software, who will provide appetizers and a drink coupon. This event is open to anyone with an interest in XML or SGML. July 5, 19:00-21:00 (7:00-9:00 p.m.), Hillman Library, Room 272, on the University of Pittsburgh campus.Joe Homan, Wireless XML. How do you fit a web site onto a 60 x 60 pixel screen? Easy: just use XML. In this overview, Joe brings us up to date on what's happening in this burgeoning field. David Birnbaum, General vs. Specific Markup. Picking the right level for markup is a crucial step in implementing XML-based information systems. In this dry run of a paper he's presenting at the upcoming Extreme Markup Conference, Pittsburgh's resident XML theoretician discusses the tradeoffs involved, and in the process solves the perpetually perplexing problem of how to decide whether to represent information as generic identifiers, attribute values, or data content. June 7, 19:00-21:00 (7:00-9:00 p.m.), Hillman Library, Room 272, on the University of Pittsburgh campus.John Nestor, Rethinking XML. Is the XML effort drowning in a sea of ever-more-complex secondary standards? Is XML's attempt to separate content and processing a colossal mistake? Is XML doomed because it has failed to provide a mechanism for defining semantics? Come hear John "Iconoclast" Nestor discuss these and other issues in a thought-provoking presentation that he will give next week at XML Europe. Gregory DiMedio, Document Management is Process Management. During a recent project developing SGML-based documentation for a large fast-food company, Agnew Moyer Smith discovered that before an organization can reap the rewards of a powerful information management system, there must be a period of turmoil. In this presentation Gregory will share that voyage of discovery and how SGML structured and clarified the way. May 3, 19:00-21:00 (7:00-9:00 p.m.), Hillman Library, Room 272, on the University of Pittsburgh campus.PittMark is now one year old - come celebrate! Kay Ethier, FrameMaker+XML. Frame has long been one of the predominent SGML tool providers, and now, under the leadership of John Warnock, Adobe is investing heavily in the transition to XML. Come hear Kay tell us what's new. Plus: Bill Lewis, A Crash Course in Schemas. With his background in databases, Bill has been watching the evolution of XML Schemas with great interest. Now that the W3C has issued its final call, Bill is ready to elucidate this important topic. April 5Jim Restivo, MetaStar: Knowledge-Enabled Interactive Web Applications Using XML. Blue Angel Technologies is a Pennsylvania-based purveyor of knowledge management frameworks whose customers include the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the National Library of Australia. In this presentation, Jim will demo MetaStar, a tool to support the entire lifecycle of on-line information: from capture and organization to access and use. March 1Michael Spring, XML and Document Processing: A Broad Perspective This presentation is a reflection on the current state of document processing with particular attention to XML. The processing and exchange of documents requires a variety of tools and standards, and the presenter is particularly interested in how those tools and standards are used, misused, and abused in the evolution of electronic document processing. February 2Markup Language Happy Hour. The semiannual PittMark Happy Hour was held at the Church Brew Works and Restaurant, 3525 Liberty Avenue, in Lawrenceville, from 17:00 to 19:00 (5:00 to 7:00 p.m.).
The Happy Hour was sponsored by ClearlyOnline, a Pittsburgh-based XML training and consulting firm.
January 12Special meeting on the use of markup for historical metadata. Room 272, Hillman Library, 19:00 (7:00 p.m.). Elizabeth Shaw, SGML and the Digital Library. The Historic Pittsburgh project of the University of Pittsburgh's Digital Library uses SGML to serve up a collection of texts and maps on the History of Western Pennsylvania. Elizabeth Shaw will explain the advantages of using markup languages even when the content being delivered is not itself marked up. Dressing in historic costume is optional. Jason Tiscione, XML Metadata for County Records. As the web proliferates, county governments are left with large quantities of legacy documents they'd like to put on line - deeds, mortgages, liens, birth and death records, etc. In this presentation Jason Tiscione will describe a system i-muse, Inc. has built using Java and SAX to exploit XML as a database schema description language for serving up scanned documents. PLUS a special bonus: XML '99.9 Didn't make it to Philadelphia? Not to worry - your tireless PittMark reporters were there, and will present their summary of the conference. Cheese steaks not included. December 1Mary Tabasko, The Perils of Repurposing. The theory of using markup to guide publication of an underlying document in multiple formats sounds great. But does it work? Come hear Mary describe the agonies and the ecstasies she experienced while developing unified course materials that could generate slides, student notes, and instructor's guides from a single underlying SGML document base. Alan Houser, SGML Publishing at CLARITECH. CLARITECH supports a wide range of users of its C++ toolkit - application developers, expert users, even internal developers - all from a single set of SGML source files. Alan will talk about CLARITECH's publishing solution, including the design of their DTD, the "idiosyncrasies" of their authoring tool (FrameMaker+SGML), and their use of Perl to down-convert SGML to HTML. November 11Gary Bell, XML for Electronic Commerce. For many people, XML is the thing that will finally let them search for the correct size and color of shoes on the Web. Gary Bell, of the CTC's Electronic Commerce Resource Center in Johnstown, has been monitoring XML's "killer app" and will tell us what the future holds. October 19George Starrett, XML-Based Knowledge Management. You think you've got problems? AT&T's Customer Service group has to deal with 28,000 document produced by 400 different authors and produce accurate, real-time answers to questions from thousands of irate customers. In this talk, George gives a persuasive account of how XML enabled him to dramatically improve his company's performance with regard to these issues. Pete Beazley, Slinging XML in the Burgh. Pete Beazley has gone from finite-element analyst to starting up his own full-service XML company, ClearlyOnline. In the process, he's accumulated some strong opinions on a wide range of XML technologies and developed some interesting techniques for serving XML over the Internet. Come hear him recount his experiences and discuss practical ways of rapidly implementing XML tools in today's environment. September 15John Nestor, XML For All!. Currently there is an unwieldy dichotomy between the markup languages we use to describe documents and the scripting language we use to process those documents. John Nestor's company aims to unify those two universes with an innovative approach that blends them into a seamless, synergistic whole. D'Arcy Roper, An Introduction to eXcelon. eXcelon is hot. Exploiting its experience with object-oriented databases, Object Design has come up with an exciting new toolset for XML applications. Don't miss this technical overview of their system. August 25Markup Languages Happy Hour. Held at the Church Brew Works and Restaurant, 3525 Liberty Avenue, in Lawrenceville. July 21Kim Harrigal, Electronic Surveys Using XML. FreeMarkets On-Line is one of Pittsburgh's most dynamic Internet companies, and at last count was managing half a billion dollars in business-to-business commerce. Kim Harrigal has been working on an electronic survey system to support FreeMarket's transactions, and in this presentation she told about the trials and tribulations of implementing a real-world application in XML. Michael Muha, EPIC: The Next-Generation XML-Based Document Management System. Arbortext was a pioneer in the SGML-tools business, and continues to be a leader in the XML era. Mike Muha gave a technical overview of Arbortext's brand-new, end-to-end, all-in-one, slices-and-dices document management system. June 16David Birnbaum, The Virtues of Invalid Markup. SGML is great for creating new documents, but what do you do if you are trying to mark up an existing document that doesn't quite adhere to its own implicit DTD? David's surprising answer is: use incorrect markup. May 18Bill Von Hagen, SGML for Smart-Alecs. Bill is the author of
"SGML for Dummies", and in this presentation he shared his thoughts about
the history of SGML, antique computers, and grunge rock.
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