XTech 2008: “The Web on the Move” — 6-9 May 2008, Dublin, Ireland
News feeds
Your account
XTech 2008 news
Subscribe to receive news about XTech
Presentations
Ian Davis (Talis)
This talk will give an overview of designing, implementing and evolving a RESTful API.
Praveen Alavilli (AOL)
So far we have been talking about mashing up with user centric identity and the missing connecting dots for 'deputization' and permission management. Now it's time to talk about how a new emerging open and community driven standard called "OAuth" helps in bridging these gaps. And of course more open issues that yet remain to be solved.
Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Flickr (Yahoo))
OAuth is poised to be one of most important new standards in 2008 for anyone building with identity, social platforms, or APIs. Come find out why we designed OAuth the way we did, why it works, when it doesn't, and how to wrangle OAuth to fit your requirements. We'll cover considerations when designing an OAuth secured API including security implications, mobile user experience, and pitfalls.
Clinton Smullen (University of Tennessee),
Stephanie Smullen (University of Tennessee)
Presentation:
Agnostic AJAX_ Asynchronous JavaScript and Data Presentation
[ZIP]
Paper: Agnostic AJAX_ Asynchronous JavaScript and Data Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: Agnostic AJAX_ Asynchronous JavaScript and Data Paper 1 [PDF]
An experimental study of the relative performances of a traditional HTML application and a set of comparable AJAX applications that use several different update data methodologies: partial HTML, XML, JSON, and CSV (comma separated values). A wide range of response sizes are included. Advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed, as are applicability in special cases such as mobile clients.
Gavin Starks (d::gen network)
Launched during the 2007 XTech keynote, AMEE has had an amazing year. Aggregating more than half a million users through clients such as the UK Government and Google, we'll outline our next hopes and steps for the project. AMEE has also demonstrated a potential model for the anonymous aggregation of personal data, bridging brand-equity and privacy issues.
Aral Balkan (Yeah, Let's Do It!)
When did Flash grow up? From annoying ads and animations to RIAs, the Flash Platform has come a long way. Join Aral for an honest, entertaining, and inspriring overview of the Flash Platform. Experience RIAs with Flex, desktop applications with AIR, and mobile applications with Flash Lite. Review the state of accessibility, open source, mashups, video, and 3D on the Flash Platform.
Michael(tm) Smith (W3C)
In the year since XTech 2007, changes of interest to Web developers have been made to Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer and the engines that power them — added/improved support for standards (and non-standards), new versions for mobile devices, and more. This session takes a look back at what the changes have been — as well as taking a look ahead to see what may be on the way next.
Aidan Hogan (DERI Galway)
Presentation:
Building a Semantic Web Search Engine_ Challenges and Solutions Presentation 1
[PDF]
Paper: Building a Semantic Web Search Engine_ Challenges and Solutions Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: Building a Semantic Web Search Engine_ Challenges and Solutions Paper 1 [PDF]
overview of the architecture of SWSE, a Semantic Web Search Engine that scales to billions of RDF statements, and discuss in detail the necessary adaptations to traditional search engine components, in particular indexing, query processing, and ranking.
Jan Lehnardt (Freisatz)
In this workshop you will learn the foundations of writing distributed, highly available and fault tolerant applications on top of CouchDB, the new RESTful database.
Blaine Cook (romeda.org)
Real-time interaction is becoming a necessity on the ever-more dynamic Web. Jabber is a powerful established protocol, already used by over 10 million people worldwide, and ideally suited to web application development. Whether you're an API developer or writing client apps, this workshop offers real experience and practical advice.
Jeremy Keith (Clearleft)
Why does every new social networking site make you re-enter all your details and rebuild your friends list? Your contact and relationship details are already published elsewhere. If this data is published in hCard and XFN, it is readable by machines as well as people. Learn how a little sprinkling of microformats can create an ecosystem that makes portable social networks a reality.
Bert Bos (W3C)
The CSS Advanced Layout module promises to provide Web designers with traditional layout grids, but it can also be used to layout smaller things, such as forms or mathematical formulas.
Gavin Bell (Nature)
We are prone to solve technical problems addressing the needs of conference attending alpha geeks. Yet, widespread adoption is quite different to a private beta.
What does this mean? How do we mitigate the desire for rapid progress with the needs of the rest of us? These hot new technologies require some psychological insight to make them meaningful. You know the technology, come and grok humans
Uldis Bojārs (DERI Galway),
John Breslin (DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway),
Alexandre Passant (LaLIC institute (at Université Paris Sorbonne) and Electricité de France R&D)
Paper:
Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF Paper
[PDF]
Data portability has become an important requirement on the Social Web. We demonstrate how data and social network portability can be achieved by building upon existing Semantic Web developments such as SIOC and FOAF. SIOC provides a common format for expressing user-generated content and tools for import/export of this information. FOAF provides a way to link users' social networks.
Gareth Rushgrove (Gareth Rushgrove)
Presentation:
Design Strategies for a Distributed Web Presentation
[PDF]
Paper: Design Strategies for a Distributed Web Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: Design Strategies for a Distributed Web Paper 1 [PDF]
We might be standardising around a handful of web development frameworks but we're still re-inventing the wheel when it comes to the things we build. A vibrant ecosystem of commercial grade API providers, such as Amazon with their S3 and EC2 services, could change all that. But what needs to happen to make this web services dream a reality? And where are the potential pitfalls for successful apps?
Evan Henshaw-Plath (tbd)
Fire Eagle is a new service designed to make it safe and easy to build and use location-aware applications and services. It's a place for users to store information about their current location that trusted apps and sites can update or access.
The talk covers how Fire Eagle works and how to use it to build a fire eagle client application oauth and RESTful web services to share user locations.
Anne van Kesteren (Opera Software ASA)
In this session the Access Control specification and its relationship to XMLHttpRequest will be explained and how these will impact the Web.
Arve Bersvendsen (Opera Software ASA)
Presentation:
external link
Web Applications (and widgets) have historically had little or no access to the device and the user's data, making it a safe, but boring haven. This is about to change. This presentation will focus on securely allowing access to the device and its data through natively integrated components and native JavaScript plugins.
Frank Mantek (Google)
3 years after the Google Data APIs were first released, and a good year after Atom Publication was finalised, there are lessons to be learned. When you spearhead on a working draft, you are bound to take turns that with hindsight seem less than ideal, or could be solved differently now that the standard your work was based on is actually finalised.
Leigh Dodds (Ingenta)
This presentation will look at the process of publishing open data and review issues surrounding stability of both data and vocabularies, as well providing some recommendations for how to publish open data.
Brendan Quinn (BBC),
Ben Smith (BBC)
During 2008, the BBC is undertaking a "Tech Refresh" project, replacing the platform underneath bbc.co.uk with a data-driven, RESTful service oriented, platform independent architecture. This session will describe what we've done so far, what we're aiming to do and how it will allow the BBC to support social networking, opening up our data, OpenID, and more.
Eric van der Vlist (Dyomedea)
This introduction walks you step by step through a simple yet complete Web 2.0 "mashup" application.
Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!)
Presentation:
JavaScript_ The Good Parts Presentation 1
[PDF]
Paper: JavaScript_ The Good Parts Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: JavaScript_ The Good Parts Paper 1 [PDF]
In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. My intention here is to expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable, and maintainable.
Daniel Lewis (OpenLink Software)
Presentation:
Linked Data Deployment Presentation 1
[PDF]
Paper: Linked Data Deployment Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: Linked Data Deployment Paper 1 [PDF]
The wider developer community is increasing its understanding of the "Web of Data," as users demand the right to own their data. Unanswered questions include how to fit this data into other structures and how to link across them. We will discuss what Linked Data is; what it tries to fix; hurdles in developing a Linked Data system; and how Linked Data fits with the Data Space philosophy.
Jan Lehnardt (Freisatz)
Presentation:
Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB Presentation
[ZIP]
Paper: Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB Paper 1 [PDF]
CouchDB is a new kid on the database block and it plays by its own rules. It is a document oriented database with a REST API and it uses JSON to store data. This talk explains CouchDB and does not shy away from the technical details that make CouchDB so interesting.
Simon Batistoni (Flickr)
Presentation:
Ni Hao, Monde_ Connecting communities across cultural and linguistic boundaries Presentation
[PDF]
Paper: Ni Hao, Monde_ Connecting communities across cultural and linguistic boundaries Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: Ni Hao, Monde_ Connecting communities across cultural and linguistic boundaries Paper 1 [PDF]
Even as we build denser and denser communities online, they're still often disjointed and compartmentalised by language and locality. This session, led by Flickr's lead internationalisation engineer, will explore practical solutions and "pie in the sky" ideas on ways in which we can break down some of those barriers and create truly global places where people can share and communicate.
Mary Ann Malloy (The MITRE Corporation)
Presentation:
Online Reputation Management_ Putting Your Best [Cyber] Foot Forward Presentation 1
[PDF]
Have you checked your online identity lately? Did what you find surprise you? Are you pleased with the impression it might make on others? What can you do about it? This talk covers methods grounded in public domain resources to help you proactively establish and maintain your online reputation. Topics will include best practices and related issues, such as privacy vs. free speech online.
Fabrice Desré (Orange Labs)
Open Mashups is a complete tool suite empowering non-programmers to create their own applications by assembling existing functionnal components. Unlike existing solutions, the system is fully expandable and configurable: it uses code generators to target various platforms and devices (like mobile phones, web pages or desktop widgets) and provides a pluggable components model.
Chewy Trewhella (Google)
OpenSocial is an Open Standard defining a set of common APIs that work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Plaxo, Hi5, Ning, orkut, Salesforce.com and LinkedIn, among others. This allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites, reaching over 200M+ users in dozens of countries: Learn once, write anywhere.
Bob Buffone (Nexaweb Technologies, Inc.)
Presentation:
external link
Best Practices Deployed to Performance-tune Large Ajax Applications
Vincent Vergonjeanne (Microsoft Corporation)
I will demonstrate how Silverlight 2.0, using Blend 2.5 & Visual Studio 2008, can optimize your time of development and will prove it by developing, with you, a video game during the time of the session.
Sean McGrath (Propylon)
Sean leads us on a Celtic-tinted safari of the Web featuring mythical creatures, tenuous analogies and curious interconnections. The mission: to boldly split all necessary infinitives and go where no Web has gone before.
Stephen Dunn (Guardian News and Media),
Matthew Wall (Guardian News and Media)
We will show how guardian.co.uk has been rebuilt on a new platform involving a new information and technical architecture, and a move to a greater use of web technologies to simplify the platform.
Andrew Walkingshaw (University of Cambridge)
Presentation:
Representing, indexing and mining scientific data using XML and RDF_ Golem and CrystalEye Presentation
[PDF]
Paper: Representing, indexing and mining scientific data using XML and RDF_ Golem and CrystalEye Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: Representing, indexing and mining scientific data using XML and RDF_ Golem and CrystalEye Paper 1 [PDF]
We introduce our work on building tools to mine scientific literature. Using our Golem language/toolkit, we have inferred an ontology for, and extracted RDF metadata from, the tens of thousands of crystallographic datasets obtained automatically from journals as part of our CrystalEye repository. We then show some of the ways in which this enhances our ability to search and mine scientific data.
Richard Cyganiak (DERI Galway)
Believe it or not, there are over 50 millions of semantically structured documents out there (in RDF.. the uppercase Semantic Web!). In this presentation i will show how to create applications that automatically locate them and process them to fulfill several use cases. Finally, i will highlight how to efficiently publish one's existing data and the extraordinary advantages that this brings.
Jeni Tennison (The Stationery Office),
John Sheridan (The Office of Public Sector Information)
Presentation:
SemWebbing the London Gazette Presentation 1
[PDF]
Paper: SemWebbing the London Gazette Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: SemWebbing the London Gazette Paper 1 [PDF]
What does it take to add semantics to your website? The London Gazette, the UK government's Official Journal, holds a huge amount of information — statutory notices about decisions and changes at a local and national level. The government wants to expose this information using RDFa so that it becomes easy to re-use. But it takes more than just creating an ontology and changing a few lines of code.
Marc de Graauw (Marc de Graauw IT)
An overview of a national messaging architecture in Dutch healthcare. We'll take a look at how geography influences software design, at the complexities of real multilayered infrastructures, at security and reliability aspects, and the differences between publishing and messaging, and those between SOA and REST.
Silverlight 2.0 is what every .NET Developer has ever dreamed of. Being able to develop, using C# or VB.NET, Rich Internet Application as you would create Desktop Applications. I'll demonstrate, during this session, that Visual Studio 2008 along with Blend are a winning combination for creating RIA in a very efficient & robust way.
Ralph Meijer (Mediamatic Lab)
Presentation:
external link
Social Networks are all about communication. How can we start a conversation with and between Social Networking services? Using Jabber/XMPP technologies besides HTTP, we can enable two-way communication between third-party clients and services (XMPP as an API), and have services exchange (events on) social objects and people. In near real-time, with built-in authorization and authentication.
Tony Graham (Menteith Consulting Ltd)
This hands-on training is for people familiar with XSLT - either XSLT 1.0 or XSLT 2.0 - who want to improve the reliability and accuracy of their stylesheets.
Ian Forrester (BBC)
The attention economy was talked about at the end of 06 to death. Through all the hype, a couple of guys from down-under started to make sense of attention and proposed APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language).Unfortunately little is known about APML and there is a lot of mis-information on APML. As one of the working group members I will run through what it is, its purpose and why its important
Tom Scott (BBC Audio and Music Interactive),
Yves Raimond (Queen Mary, University of London),
Patrick Sinclair (BBC Audio and Music Interactive),
Nicholas Humfrey (BBC Audio and Music Interactive)
Presentation:
The Programmes Ontology Presentation
[PDF]
Paper: The Programmes Ontology Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: The Programmes Ontology Paper 1 [PDF]
BBC Programmes is a new project which aims to ensure that every programme brand, series and episode broadcast by the BBC has a permanent, findable web presence. We have developed the Programmes Ontology to expose this data following the Linked Data approach, enabling the interchange of programme information on the Semantic Web.
Hideki Hiura (JustSystems Inc.)
It's been a while since Web2.0 and Mashups were introduced as an alternative method for creating simple applications. This session walks you through how such an approach can be applied to real enterprise applications in contexts that require something more than quick composition of information from various sources.
Simon Willison (-)
The jQuery JavaScript library is one of the most popular toolkits for quickly adding robust scripted enhancements to both web pages and applications. This tutorial will provide comprehensive coverage of the jQuery library, and show how jQuery can be used to apply JavaScript in an unobtrusive way that enhances usability while keeping applications accessible to users that lack JavaScript support.
Rob Lee (Rattle Research)
Paper:
Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives Paper 1
[PDF]
By looking at how we can use sites like Wikipedia, Freebase and DBpedia as authoritative sources of content and meta-data and utilising services such as del.icio.us to provide a measure of popularity and currency (_what_ is being discussed at _this_ point in time) we can generate additional meta-data that can be used to provide new routes through existing content archives.
Brian Matthews (STFC)
Presentation:
Using Trackback to Support Citation Notification Services Presentation 1
[PDF]
Paper: Using Trackback to Support Citation Notification Services Paper 1 [PDF]
Paper: Using Trackback to Support Citation Notification Services Paper 1 [PDF]
We motivate and propose using extensions to the well-known Trackback protocol to support the notification of citation information between repositories of research outputs, particularly academic publications and scientific data.
Henri Sivonen (Henri Sivonen)
Validator.nu is an (X)HTML5 validator and a RELAX NG and Schematron-based validator for generic XML. The architecture of the software, its RESTful XML/JSON Web service API and its reusable HTML5 parsing library are presented.
David Orchard (BEA Systems)
Web services and XML extensibility and Versioning
This talk will go into the details of what can and can't be done to enable extensibility and versioning of XML Schemas, documents and Web services. A detailed analysis of the versioning mechanisms in Schema, and the pros and cons of different versioning techniques is provided. XML Schema 1.1's vast improvements in versioning will be described.
Simon Wardley (Independent)
This session looks at some of the main themes behind Web 2.0, commoditisation, innovation, portability and enterprise 2.0. It proposes that a common pattern exists behind them all, and that the "open" meme is a significant driving force behind these changes.
Steven Pemberton (CWI/W3C)
Presentation:
external link
Why Web 2.0 is harming the Web, and how we can fix it.
Michael Kay (Saxonica Limited)
XML Schema is in an odd position: everyone is using it, but no-one really likes it. It's clearly fit for purpose, or people wouldn't be using it; but it attracts complaints both because of its immense complexity and because there are basic features that it doesn't provide. Version 1.1 in on the way: this talk surveys the new features and tries to assess whether they will solve the problem.
Alf Eaton (Nature)
This presentation will examine tools that bridge the divide between objects without identifiers, objects with varying amounts of metadata, and precisely identified objects that can be connected to information networks. It will also look at tools that allow web-based information resources to communicate with desktop applications.
Steven Pemberton (CWI/W3C)
Presentation:
external link
XForms is a new technology being widely adopted by industry: even
though it was designed for forms, as the name suggests, it is capable
of, and is being used for, much more. This tutorial introduces XForms, with an emphasis on the improvements in the new version 1.1.
Mark Birbeck (webBackplane, W3C Invited Expert)
Applications built on 'skimming' principles are very loosely-coupled, and can run on just about any server-side architecture.
Liam Quin (W3C)
XML was published as a W3C Recommendation in February, 1998, a little over ten years ago. It was a huge success.
What made it do so well, and what can we learn from ithis? What were some of the milestones of XML history? And how are things looking for the future?
Jim Melton (Oracle Corp.)
The XQuery Update Facility is an eagerly awaited W3C standard for updating XML data. This important addition to the XPath/XQuery/XSLT suite of XML processing languages, in preparation for almost three years, has almost reached final Recommendation status. An example-driven close examination of the language, this talk also looks into likely further enhancements.
Doug Tidwell (IBM)
More than six years in the making, XSLT 2.0 became a W3C recommendation in February 2007. In this session, we'll cover the changes of the language, including the simpler syntax for grouping and the powerful schema and data validation features. Compared to Version 1.0, XSLT 2.0 makes the hard things easy and the difficult things possible. XSLT 2.0 is a powerful addition to anyone's toolbox.