Introduction to XForms, 14-15 February 2011

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[5 January 2011]

It’s official; on Monday and Tuesday, 14 and 15 February, I’ll be teaching a two-day hands-on course on XForms in Rockville, Maryland. Thanks to Mulberry Technologies for allowing me the use of their facilities.

If you use XML seriously, particularly in a multi-person project or organization (but even if you are on your own), and you don’t use XForms, then I think you owe it to yourself to look into the possibilities XForms offers for developing special-purpose editing interfaces for your XML documents. Sometimes, you want a specialized tool to perform one particular task on your documents. Consistency in some matters is a lot easier to achieve if you go over an entire body of material checking just the one thing in all documents. Special-purpose interfaces can help here.

For example: after long drawn-out battles, your project finally agrees on how to capitalize words in section headings: sentence case or title case? It would be nice to have a specialized editor that just showed you the section headings and let you edit them. Or suppose you decide it’s time to make a pass over your entire Web site to improve accessibility. As one task, you want to ensure that all of your images have alt text. That will be easier if you have an interface in which you can pull up each Web page and have a text widget next to each image allowing you to type in the description.

If you’re interested in the course, see the course Web page. If you’re interested in email announcements of courses (and other events at Black Mesa), subscribe to our (new!) announcements list.

The view from Black Mesa

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[13 December 2010]

When I took an introductory course in symbolic logic, all those many years ago, we used a textbook (Richard C. Jeffrey, Formal logic: its scope and limits [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967], in case you’re curious) which presented a proof method based on proof trees, which had the nice property that for valid inferences it’s guaranteed to terminate, and that for invalid inferences it will never terminate with a false positive. Allen Renear informs me that the locus classicus for proof trees is Raymond M. Smullyan, First-order logic (2d ed. New York: Dover, 1995), which I have been reading lately with pleasure.

All the theorem provers I’ve read about, however, seem to require more or less active participation and guidance from the user; like the proof-tree method, they produce a proof only when a proof exists, but unlike the proof-tree method they aren’t guaranteed to find a proof if one exists.

So I’ve been wondering: why aren’t there automatic theorem provers based on the proof-tree method?

Or are there?
[31 December 2010]

The view from Black Mesa is a new blog I have started, for posts related to digital preservation, data longevity, and the use of descriptive markup in institutions (especially but not limited to memory institutions: libraries, museums, archives).

Readers of this blog will find the style and many of the pre-occupations familiar, but the new blog will probably have fewer excursions into random topics not relevant to the mission of Black Mesa Technologies.

Automatic theorem provers and proof trees

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[13 December 2010]

When I took an introductory course in symbolic logic, all those many years ago, we used a textbook (Richard C. Jeffrey, Formal logic: its scope and limits [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967], in case you’re curious) which presented a proof method based on proof trees, which had the nice property that for valid inferences it’s guaranteed to terminate, and that for invalid inferences it will never terminate with a false positive. Allen Renear informs me that the locus classicus for proof trees is Raymond M. Smullyan, First-order logic (2d ed. New York: Dover, 1995), which I have been reading lately with pleasure.

All the theorem provers I’ve read about, however, seem to require more or less active participation and guidance from the user; like the proof-tree method, they produce a proof only when a proof exists, but unlike the proof-tree method they aren’t guaranteed to find a proof if one exists.

So I’ve been wondering: why aren’t there automatic theorem provers based on the proof-tree method?

Or are there?

Even imperfect technologies …

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[23 August 2010]

The TEI has published a list of workshops to be offered at the TEI Members’ Meeting this November in Zadar, Croatia.

Together with Syd Bauman of Brown University, I’m offering two tutorial workshops: one on XForms and one on XQuery. Each will last a day and a half, and involve some talking heads, some group discussion, and as much hands-on work as we can manage.

There are several other very good workshops on offer: Norm Walsh on XProc, the TEI@Oxford team on the ODD system, Elena Pierazzo and Malte Rehbein on the encoding of genetic editions, and Andreas Witt et al. on TEI for transcriptions of speech.

The organizers remind me that there is an early-bird discount for those who register before 31 August. There is some chance that tutorials which fail to attract enough participants will be canceled if they don’t get enough registration, so if you definitely want to come, you definitely want to register early, to help make sure your tutorial has enough registrants to make the cut.

[17 November 2010, Brussels]

“Even imperfect technologies can change the world.”
-Hans Uszkoreit, at the META-FORUM meeting in Brussels today

XForms and XQuery tutorials at TEI members’ meeting

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[23 August 2010]

The TEI has published a list of workshops to be offered at the TEI Members’ Meeting this November in Zadar, Croatia.

Together with Syd Bauman of Brown University, I’m offering two tutorial workshops: one on XForms and one on XQuery. Each will last a day and a half, and involve some talking heads, some group discussion, and as much hands-on work as we can manage.

There are several other very good workshops on offer: Norm Walsh on XProc, the TEI@Oxford team on the ODD system, Elena Pierazzo and Malte Rehbein on the encoding of genetic editions, and Andreas Witt et al. on TEI for transcriptions of speech.

The organizers remind me that there is an early-bird discount for those who register before 31 August. There is some chance that tutorials which fail to attract enough participants will be canceled if they don’t get enough registration, so if you definitely want to come, you definitely want to register early, to help make sure your tutorial has enough registrants to make the cut.