Atomic Technology - Tim Bray
2005 will mark the completion of the "Atom" project, on the surface an IETF Working Group, at a deeper level an effort of the whole community of people interested in syndication and information flow.
This talk will provide a technical/political overview of the Atom project, widen the focus to consider issues of language design in general, and build on those discussions to take a very general discussion of what causes new technologies to succeed, or to fail, in the marketplace.

The Missing Piece for Web Services: Document Engineering with UBL - Tim McGrath
Behind the concept of doing business (and its new variants such as e- commerce and web services) lies the very simple and natural idea of exchanging documents. However the market focus for web services and e- commerce has been on technical issues such as architectures and frameworks and not on the real challenge - that of content. The problem to be solved is not "how do we exchange documents?" but "what should the documents we exchange look like?" If these documents are not designed correctly, the information they contain may be interpreted in incompatible ways defeating the purpose of improving business communications.

This address introduces the new discipline of Document Engineering, a set of analysis and design techniques that yield meaningful and reusable models of the document exchanges between businesses. It then applies these techniques to describe the Universal Business Language (UBL) as a library of reusable standardized patterns for designing compatible and interoperable documents.

An Irish Stew of chameleon, platypus, snake and ant - Sean McGrath
In this talk, Sean will use some dubious analogies with the animal kingdom to illustrate some important trends in document authoring, storage and processing, namely microdocuments, dynamic typing and pipelining. He will argue that some of these trends carry with them the implication that some of today's most cherised suppositions about how XML works (or should work) may turn out to be mutton dressed up as lamb.

Privacy, Security, and Common Sense - Lauren Wood
Every day our RSS feeds and technology news broadcasts are full of dire warnings about security issues, lack of privacy, and identity theft. Are we really in as much danger as some people say? What are the real dangers, and what can be done about them? This talk will discuss some use cases, motivations, and difficulties in protecting your privacy and identity while still being able to take advantage of internet technologies.