Claus Huitfeldt responded to one of the many variants of “What is a Text Really:” Finally, and most importantly, I am struck by the lack of imagination in this approach: why on earth should texts by all means be hierarchies? No doubt, there are many hierarchical structures, and no doubt this is important, but there are countless other relations between text elements which are worth while finding and investigating- overlap, substitution, discontinuity, parallel texts, cross-references, etc. “Multi-Dimensional Texts in a One-Dimensional Medium.” Huitfeldt, Claus. 1992. Huitfeldt and Sperberg-McQueen have labored for decades on the imaginative representation of texts in markup. As have many others. Humanities scholars are confronted with a bewildering array of markup languages and techniques, should they not decide to invent their own for representing complex texts. A number of those syntaxes are illustrated here, to lay the groundwork for this heretical suggestion: Humanists should use any consistent method they choose for complex markup. The burden of preparing texts for interchange, should rest on technologists who have input those texts in a hypergraph database. Let scholars be about what scholars do and technologists at aiding them in those tasks, not training them for new ones.

This proposal emerges out of conversations about introducting collaborative editing into OpenDocument Format (ODF) applications, as a type of change tracking. Vis-a-vis a document, a lone author is a lesser and included case of collaborative editing. In either case, changes have to be captured, along with their metadata, and reconciled, in the case of conflicting edits. Despite progress on the software side of collaborative editing for a variety of formats, there has been no visible progress on the capturing of changes, or their reconcilation in OpenDocument Format documents. Being habituated, not to say addicted, to markup approaches, it's understandable I find the lack of format discussions disquieting. It's all well and good to have change tracking/collaborative editing, successfully in software, but what the hell am I going to write down in ODF? How to capture changes, from one or many authors, and how to capture reconciliations are the focus of this proposal. That requires unique identification of changes (one or many authors), identifying where changes may be applied, and recording the application of changes (the resulting document).

Stephen Gandel's Damn Excel! How the 'most important software application of all time' is ruining the world is NOT an indictment of Excel. It is an indictment of the inability to: link spreadsheets to emails track relationships between cells and between cells and formulas track comments on spreadsheet errors have versioning for cell contents/formulas Without those capabilities, spreadsheets are dangerous to their authors and others. How dangerous you ask? A short list of horror stories would include: 2013, the "London Whale," JPMorgan Chase, lost £250 million; 2013, error in calculation of international Government debt to GDP ratios; 2012, JPMorgan Chase loses $6.2 billion due to a spreadsheet formula error; 2011, MF Global collapses, in part due to the use of spreadsheets to track assets and liabilities; 2010, US Federal Reserve, spreadsheet error on calculation of $4 billion in Consumer Revolving Credit. The EuSpRIG Horror Stories page has a generous sampling of more spreadsheet horror stories. Statistically speaking, F1F9 estimates: 88% of all spreadsheets have errors in them, while 50% of spreadsheets used by large companies have material defects, resulting in loss of time and money, damaged reputations, lost jobs and disrupted careers. If that weren't bad enough, other research indicates that 33% of all bad business decisons are traceable to spreadsheet errors. That's right, 33% of all bad business decisions. That's a business case looking for a solution. Yes? Disclaimer: Topic maps, even a legend based on the Topic Maps Reference Model, ISO/IEC 13250-5 (2015), cannot magically prevent fraud, stupidity or human error. Topic maps can enable the modeling of relationships within spreadsheets, create comment tracking on errors/spreadsheets, even when the comments are in emails, and explore the subject identities and merging practices required for content level versioing of spreadsheets. Our goal is to empower you to detect fraud, stupidity and human error. On the technical side, we will analyze real world spreadsheets, determine subjects to be represented and how to identify them, create a legend that will constrain the representatives of subjects (using ordinary XML tools), create a topic map of an actual spreadsheet and review our results against the known requirements to improve auditing of spreadsheets. The auditing process itself will be shown to be auditable.

To provide office applications with an easy interoperable document merge capability and to enable the usage of document revision across applications, it is necessary to not only standardize the representations of a document state, but also of the changes made to the document during the editing process. Tracking the changes during editing retains the information usually being recovered afterwards. This avoids costly and time consuming processes like document comparison and diff heuristics [1]. To this day, file formats such as the OpenDocument file format (ODF) do only specify all possible document variations of a document representing the final state of user data. Interoperability is therefore only given on a document level: One ODF application saves a document and a different application is able to load and continue work on the same document state. Common scenarios of document exchange have been by floppy disc, attached to email and exchange across networks via file services such as Dropbox. Nowadays, the Internet is ubiquitous and multiple users want to work simultaneously on the same document. In that context the transfer of a whole document from user to user is inefficient. Additionally, finding and merging changes in XML-based documents appears to be complex and possibly error-prone [2]. For this reason, the OASIS Advanced Document Collaboration subcommittee has started to simplify collaboration by specifying the changes applicable to an ODF document and raising ODF application interoperability from a full document level to a more granular document change level. In this paper, we present an approach to ODF change representation called "Merge enabled Change-Tracking" (MCT), which is based on the Operational Transformation approach [3].

Collaboration is an important activity that is increasingly using technology to improve the productivity of the participants. The Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM) is a proposed OASIS standard for interoperation among collaboration services. ICOM is intended to be a framework for integrating a broad range of domain models for collaboration environments. The intention is to encourage independent software vendors and open source communities to create common collaboration clients that interoperate with integrated collaboration platforms and standalone collaboration services across enterprise boundaries. This paper provides an overview of ICOM that covers the high-level concepts, directory, space, access control, metadata, content management, and unified message models. ICOM is represented in several formats: the Java Persistence API, XML Schema, RDF and OWL. We also describe an example application based on ICOM.

Markup standards and projects are created, managed, and sometimes destroyed through group process. While this process is often a bit bumpy, there are some occasions when it goes spectacularly badly. Tales of these committee disasters can be not only entertaining, but also (and more importantly) informative. Panelists will spend a maximum of 10 minutes each, describing a committee/working group disaster of some sort, including: what went wrong, how it could have been prevented, how it could have been (or how it was) resolved. Participants may anonymize their tales of woe, provided they assure us that the events they describe actually occurred and that that they were actually involved.

There is a lot of smoke but is there any fire? Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle, Google, Redhat and others are contending over two XML vocabularies for office documents (word processor, spread sheet, presentation tool, etc.) at the moment. Fans of OOXML or ODF are hard to find among people who have spent the last twenty years researching and developing markup and markup systems. In fact, many in the markup community dismiss these efforts as unimportant and/or uninteresting. Patrick Durusau, the editor of ODF and who has called for the co-evolution of OOXML and ODF in an ISO context thinks they are important, possibly very important. Come find out what has captured the interest of at least one topic map and overlapping markup theorist.

The Topic Maps Reference Model (TMRM) defines the qualities of subject mapping that distinguish it from other information technologies. It defines subject maps very abstractly in order to avoid limiting the design choices that can be made when creating them. However, its high level of abstraction is not helpful to readers who need only to grasp its essential principles. Using commonplace examples,(1) this paper illustrates those principles. Briefly, they are that authors can determine what subjects they wish to represent in a subject map, how information about those subjects is expressed, and how, when two or more representatives represent the same subject, they should be viewed as a single representative. The TMRM provides requirements that disclosures of such design choices must meet in order to facilitate the interchange and exploitation of subject maps.

The problem of overlapping markup has often been addressed using variant syntaxes, milestones, standoff markup and other means. This proposal combines the use of co-indexed milestones with a table structure in a database, plus CONCUR namespaces and common location (markup tokens that have no intervening PCDATA) information to illustrate one way to parse XML with more information than is available using standard markup. The result is a data structure that can be explored to determine the best data structure for overlapping hierarchies.

This document provides an introduction to Published Subjects and basic requirements and recommendations for publishers of Published Subjects.

This document provides an introduction to Published Subjects and basic requirements and recommendations for publishers of Published Subjects.

From the Publisher:In this second edition of High Places in Cyberspace, Patrick Durusau provides an updated and expanded how-to guide and map of the Internet focusing on meeting the needs of scholars in biblical studies, religion, classics and archaeology. Durusau offers a practical introduction and reference to accessing Internet resources, covering methods such as electronic mailing lists, ftp, on-line libraries, search engines, and the World Wide Web. This book includes an annotated topical listing of over 1,000 scholarly resources available on the Internet, such as Web sites displaying original scanned papyri, web sites with original texts, mailing lists between scholars and on-line library addresses. In a new final section, Durusau provides an introduction to the creation of web resources along with pointers to a number of helpful tools available on the Internet.

Abstract The implementation,of concurrent markup,by Durusau and O'Donnell (Extreme Markup 2001) relies upon related but separate principles. First, markup, commonly described in tree notation, is actually metadata about PCDATA. Second, the membership of any "atom of PCDATA" ,in a given hierarchy can be recorded as metadata for that PCDATA. These two principles have allowed the authoring and querying of overlapping hierarchies using standard XML software. This presentation moves beyond the use of text snippets to illustrate overlapping hierarchies and