Balisage: where serious markup practitioners and theoreticians meet every summer. If you are happy to be the person in your project who understands the angle brackets and stuff, then you are a markup geek and Balisage is the place for you. Even if you are NOT a markup geek, if you find it instructive to spend time with them now and then, you will enjoy Balisage.

Balisage:
The Markup Conference 2020

28 July – 31 July 2020 … Balisage: The Markup Conference

27 July 2020 … pre-conference Symposium - The Role of XML in Publishing Accessible Documents

Cambria Hotel & Suites
1 Helen Heneghan Way
Rockville, Maryland 20850
USA

Balisage is an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information.

Hybrid Format: Balisage 2020 Plans Online and In-person Participation

Balisage 2020 will combine a live event in Rockville, MD, USA with virtual participation for both speakers and attendees. Details coming soon; for now:

  • Save the dates — it takes just as long to attend a conference in front of a computer screen as in a conference room
  • Write and submit papers — peer review and paper selection is unchanged
  • Presentation mechanics will change — the highly focused technical nature of Balisage will not change
  • Papers will be published in the Balisage Series on Markup Technologies

Click for more Details as they develop


Early Career Participation in Balisage

In order to encourage early-career participation in "Balisage: The Markup Conference", the Conference Committee announces 2 cost-reduction options for information professionals with less than 5 years' experience working with markup or marked-up documents. Details on Early Career Participation page.

Topics discussed in papers on the 2019 program include: languages for markup and text processing, multitasking in XForms, loose-leaf publishing, data longevity, data interchange, Invisible XML, sustainability, the Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL), SVG, arbitrary constraints, parsing in XSLT and XQuery, successes and failures, validation, metaschemas, markup vocabularies, the TEI critical apparatus model, TEI, digital editions, punchlists, tokenization of XML, inscription, the Model-Value-Controller model in XForms, theory of parsing, encoding practices, Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), Brzozowski derivatives, XForms, SGML, textual analysis, standoff markup, declarative programming, XQuery and XSLT, eXist-db, data conversion, Web sockets, the DITA Open Toolkit, JSON Schema, GUIs in the X-stack, Earley parsing, CSS, YAML, rules, XML user interfaces, testability, XSL area tree, DITA specialization, expressions, and XML everywhere.

Unfamiliar with Balisage? To get a taste of Balisage, browse the Proceedings' Master Topics List by clicking on the "+" to expand the Concepts, Specifications, or Processes topics lists.


People involved with Balisage

The people making Balisage include markup theoreticians and practitioners, data modelers, designers, architects, and both aficionados and deep thinkers. We work as software developers, system architects, academics, integrators, librarians, data miners, lexicographers, archivists, document managers, standards developers, programmers, and publishers.

Conference Committee

Chair
B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies
Co-Chairs
Deborah A. Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies
James David Mason
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies
Norman Walsh, MarkLogic Corporation

Advisory Board

There is nothing so practical as a good theory