Upcoming MUGL Events

The definitive calendar for MUGL events is maintained on Meetup.com.

Perhaps the best way to stay informed of upcoming MUGL events is to subscribe to the MUGL calendar on MeetUp. Once you're there, scroll down to the bottom of the calendar grid and look for the links to add us into your iCal or Outlook calendar.

Past MUGL Events

Nov 27: The EX-Man from Brussels

In July our featured speaker was Florent Georges, Consultant, XML & XQuery expert, W3C member and well-known Belgian. Florent discussed a project he's been working on: EXPath Console for MarkLogic.

July 10: The (Cyber)Man From The BBC^*

In July our featured speaker was Jem Rayfield, Lead Technical Architect of Future Media and Technology at the BBC. Jem has been leading a major MarkLogic-based project at the Beeb that will process all the information, in real time, for the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games in London. We're very lucky that Jem has agreed to take time out from what must be an intense schedule to stop by and talk to us.

UPDATE: The very successful London 2012 Olypmics came and went and everything was tickety-boo at the BBC. Congratulations to Jem and his team.

Synopsis

In this talk, Jem describes the latest developments in the transformational technology strategy the BBC Future Media & Technology department is using to evolve from a relational content model and static publishing framework to a fully Dynamic Semantic Publishing (DSP) architecture. This approach uses XML/XQuery and linked data technology to automate the aggregation, publishing and re-purposing of interrelated content objects according to an ontological domain-modelled information architecture, providing a greatly improved user experience and high levels of user engagement. The BBC's World Cup web site was the first showcase of DSP, and probably the first major implementation of semantic web technologies on a commercial media site. In 2012, the BBC will launch two new sites based on DSP: The 2012 Olympics and a completely redesigned BBC Sports site.

Jem's Bio

Lead Technical Architect in the Future Media and Technology division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), specifically focusing on News, Sport & Knowledge products. This places him at the centre of BBC online architectural strategy and implementation decisions. Prior to working at the BBC, Jem was Technology Director at Razorfish, architecting solutions for numerous clients including O2 and the Financial Times. In his free time, Jem enjoys listening and playing (badly) a wide and eclectic range of music. He also enjoys spending time at the gym.

Twitter: @jemrayfield
LinkedIn: jem-rayfield
^*"You will be upgraded"

May 22, 2012: Good Lord, Tennison

On May 22 we were honored to have Dr. Jeni Tennison as our featured guest. While in Prague I was able to convince Dr. Tennison (who gave the keynote at XML Prague 2012) to speak at the MUGL. Jeni doesn't do many events like this so we're doubly lucky that she agreed visit us.

Dr. Tennison's interests are far ranging and tend toward the academic, but she is perhaps best known for writing three XSLT books: Beginning XSLT 2.0, Beginning XSLT and XSLT and XPath On The Edge.

Topic of her talk was: "I can talk about legislation.gov.uk and how we're using MarkLogic within it, and *not* using ML for some of the new features that we're supporting."

Everyone agreed this was one of the best presentation in the MUGL's history.

Twitter: @JeniT

March 8, 2012: Czech Please

In March we had Adam Retter, speaking about RESTful XQuery, using XQuery 3.0 annotations in XQuery in a manner similar to the way JAX-RS annotations are used in Java. Adam also presented this topic at XML Prague in February. Adam is a long-time XQuery fanatic and has been a key contributor to the eXist XML database and W3C standards.

We also had Charles Foster, speaking about the subject of his XML Prague talk Building Bridges from Java to XQuery which is about his modifications to XQJ for invoking XQuery functions from Java. Charles is a MUGL regular and is a long-time MarkLogic user.

The papers that Adam and Charles submitted to XML Prague, along with all the others, can be found online here: xmlprague-2012-proceedings.pdf

There was also an informal report on the XML Prague 2012 conference, held Feb 10-12. Several MUGL members were there (three were speakers), and two others who spoke there have also been MUGL speakers. Yet another, who will be our MUGL speaker in May, gave the keynote.

February 2, 2012: The XProc-alypse

On Thursday, February 2, 2012 we had Philip Fennell, Consultant at MarkLogic, as our featured guest. Philip gave an interesting talk on XPath With MarkLogic.

November 19, 2011: The Prague Autumn

On Thursday, November 19, 2011 we had a very interesting presentation by James Fuller of MarkLogic. Jim is an XQuery innovator and spoke about being more productive with XQuery - The GSD Language. If you've never heard of the MarkLogic term "GSD", it's like Getting Things Done, but a bit ruder.

The slides for Jim's presentation from the GoTo Conference are available on SlideShare

October 19, 2011: The Saxon Invasion

On Wednesday, October 19, 2011 we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Michael Kay, the father of Saxon and influential member of various and sundry XML-related W3C standards committees.

Dr. Kay gave us a very interesting introduction to his Saxon-in-the-browser XSLT 2.0 processor that's implemented with JavaScript and GWT. If you missed this talk you've missed one of the great innovators of the XML world.

September 15, 2011: Norm Walsh, REST Easy With MarkLogic

On September 15, 2011. Norm Walsh, MarkLogic Lead Engineer, XML/XQuery/DocBook/XProc maven and well known tall guy was our guest at the September MUGL meeting.

Norm stopped off on his way to XML Summer School in Oxford to give us a very interesting talk about doing REST natively on MarkLogic. This was "Norm's half" of a talk that Norm and I presented jointly at the MarkLogic User Conference in San Francisco in May, 2011.

My MUGL intro presentation for this presentation has the usual overview of MarkLogic and some amusing photos of Norman Walsh(es).

August 17, 2011: Stephen Buxton, A Sneak Peak at MarkLogic 5.0

Stephen Buxton, Director of Product Management at MarkLogic flew in from California and gave us a very well received talk about some of the new features that will be in the MarkLogic 5.0 release, due out in a few months.

My MUGL intro presentation for this presentation gives a similar overview of MarkLogic as well as a few photos of Stephen. Unfortunately, I didn't get a copy of Stephen's slides (and he probably wouldn't give them to me anyway).

July 14, 2011: Inaugural MUGL Meeting, John Snelson

The very first meeting of the MUGL took place on July 14, 2011 at the Skills Matter Exchange.

By all accounts it was a great success. We had attendance of about 20 people, from a variety of companies around London that are using MarkLogic in many different ways. Not bad considering we did very little promotion. We even had a couple of senior MarkLogic people from The States drop by who were in London for other reasons.

One of our members, Martin Dransfield, took some photos of the event. Once I get the chance, I will upload them here and on the MeetUp site.

My MUGL intro presentation, which gave a little background on the early days of MarkLogic, was apparently quite a hit. It's Flash-based and done with a tool called Prezi. You can play it in your very own browser from the Prezi site, just click the link above.

Please spread the word about the MUGL to your friends and associates. And don't forget to sign up if you plan to attend the next meeting.