Call for Participation
Markup Vocabulary Customization
a Balisage pre-conference symposium

If you have experience with customization of a shared vocabulary, whether as a user, creator, sponsor, or someone who has to write software to support it, we’re interested in hearing from you!

What sorts of customizations should we discuss?

We hope to find out how several vocabularies accommodate customization, with examples. Are the customizations below of interest? Are there any other types of customizations you might like to see of TEI, JATS, DITA, DocBook, or another customizable vocabulary? Send email about what vocabulary customizations you want discussed to info@balisage.net. For example, customization mechanisms that allow users to:

• change the names of encoding constructs (whether they be indicated by element names or attribute values; e.g., for localization or specialization)
• narrow down the schema, i.e. to say “I will not be using these elements (or attributes)”
• restrict the schema, e.g. to say “in this system a URL is permitted as a component of a bibliographic citation; in our version of this system, a URL is a required component”
• loosen the schema, e.g. to say “in this system a title is a required component of a bibliographic citation; in our version, because ancient Klingon manuscripts often don’t have titles, a title is permitted but not required”
• expand the schema, i.e. to say “in addition to the elements available via this system, we are adding a element”
• identify, in the documents, that a customized schema has been used, and in what way(s) it was customized
• document the customizations made

Contribute a paper on a topic related to Markup Vocabulary Customization

If you have experience with customization of a shared vocabulary, whether as a user, creator, sponsor, or someone who has to write software to support it, we’re interested in hearing from you!

Topics for these peer-reviewed short papers might include, but are not remotely limited to:

• case presentations
  • successful projects built around customized vocabularies
  • war stories of customizations gone wrong
• discussions of what should be customizable and why, and what should not be customizable and why not
• theoretical examination of customizations: when is a customization useful, and when is it merely different for the sake of being different? When has a system been customized so much it is instead a different system?
• utilitarian consideration of customizations: does a customization have to be shared to be useful? If it’s not shared, what is the point of documentation?
• practical examination of writing tools designed to handle both vanilla and customized input

Help:

Just Ask:
Email: info@balisage.net for help, advice, or encouragement about a symposium submission.
Wonder if your idea will fit in at the symposium on Markup Vocabulary Customization? Ask us! Need help making your paper or proposal into XML as required for submission? Speak up; we’ll find someone to help. The only thing we won’t do is customize our schema^[1] for you. :-)

When:

Dates:

• 12 April 2019 — Paper submissions due
• 13 May 2019 — Speakers notified
• 12 July 2019 — Final papers due
• 29 July 2019 — Pre-conference Symposium
• 30 July – 2 August 2019 — Balisage: The Markup Conference

How:

Submit full papers or short paper proposals in XML to info@balisage.net
See the pages Instructions for Authors and Tag Set and Submission Guidelines for details.
Apply to the Peer Review panel

^[1] Our schema (https://www.balisage.net/tagset.html) is itself a strict subset of Docbook V5, and is carved in stone. It’s hard enough to put together a conference when everyone uses the same schema, we don’t want to even imagine it with twenty variations thereof.