The conference so far has been great. I’m itching to get started with Solr and eXist. The examples shown at the pre-conference were really exciting both for full text searching and also for doing some faceting.
Also the XForms breakout session was great. I was expecting a small crowd (like the three people who regularly comment on my blog, and myself), but we had ab out 15-20 people. There was some discussion about other tools that might do the same or similar things as far as creating editing interfaces for metadata but for the most part we talked about XForms. I also demoed our DC forms, which generated some interest. I think it was exciting for people to see some forms in action as opposed to theoretical or example forms.
Everyone expressed an interest in having a collaborative environment where work and knowledge can be shared. So Kevin has created a page for us off the cod4lib wiki, which I called xforms@code4lib (sorry, it was late). I’ve posted a bunch of resources for getting started, mostly stuff scrapped out of my blog. But I have more! Much more!
For example Adam, from the University of Virgina suggested that this might be a good place to work on creating a series of XSL stylesheets that could be used as a generic tool to output XForms based on an input schema. I’m pretty psyched by this idea, you would still need to do some tweaking of the form to add dependencies, relevancies and other features but it could do most of heavy lifting.
I’ll be doing a lightening talk on XForms today, which I was supposed to be preparing last night but I got distracted by the wiki. I think I’ll do a very quick overview of XForms, demo what UVM has in production and talk about the wiki and the need for collaboration.
I also took conference notes (with the intention of posting overviews of the sessions) but the my note taking skills are pretty bad, so if you so if you want to read all about code4lib 2007 I’d suggest looking at planet code4lib, many of these bloggers who are much more live blogging savy than I.
March 5, 2007 at 5:02 am |
I thought your lightning talk on XForms was excellent. I had read a tiny bit about XForms aeons ago but your five minutes nicely crystallized what they are; what they can look like in practice; the current state of support for XForms in browsers; and some good use cases for them. Nicely done!
March 5, 2007 at 1:03 pm |
Thanks Dan. Five minutes turned out to be a lot shorter than I had thought. I was unable to fit in the “why XForms are great for Libraries” part of my schpeel, but I think most people trying to get well formed valid XML out of people uninterested in learning (or even having to look at) XML understand the potential for XForms.
-Winona