International Workshop on Markup of Overlapping Structures
Monday 6 August, 2007
Hotel Europa, 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 brought 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.
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?
Formal presentations at the Workshop (with links to speaker bios and presentation materials, as available):
- B Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies, Introduction to the Workshop
- Steven DeRose, National Center for Biotechnology
Information (National Institutes of Health), Trojan Markup and other XML milestone-tagging techniques
- Andreas Witt, University of Tübingen, Multiple
Annotations and XConcur
- Patrick Durusau, Snowfall Software, Topic Mapping
overlap
- Wendell Piez, Mulberry Technologies, LMNL (Layered
Markup and Annotation Language)
- Jeni Tennison, Jeni Tennison Consulting, Creole
- Jean Carletta, University of Edinburgh, Mate/Nite and stand-off markup for linguistic annotation
- C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, World Wide Web Consortium,
TexMecs and Goddag structures
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