Mark Logic User Conference Track Descriptions and Breakout Sessions 2009

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Breakout Sessions

Bridging the Structured Information Gap in Clinical Documentation by Applying XML and CDA

Craig Wilkins, Webmedx

Over 60 percent of all clinical information in a patient’s Electronic Health Record is comprised of unstructured dictation and transcribed medical text. More importantly, this 60 percent represents the most important data within the chart in terms of patient care, risk management, and reimbursement: Physician Documentation. The HL7 sponsored Clinical Documentation Architecture (CDA) initiative provides the standard for representing valuable physician narrative as individual data elements. This data has a myriad of applications within today’s EHR environment, from standardized clinical reports to improved quality to more accurate coding and billing. The problem is how to apply the CDA standard to large volumes of unstructured narrative from dozens of disparate sources. The answer lies within structured XML within the clinical document. This presentation will demonstrate real-world applications of XML technology on clinical content. Attendees will learn how to leverage XML and CDA to provide meaningful applications that assist healthcare providers in recognizing their return on investment in the EHR.

Content Applications Being Developed at the LDS Church

Mike Bowers, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

The LDS Church has adopted MarkLogic as the platform of choice for interactive web sites, content applications, single source repositories, and basic content management systems. This presentation explores these applications and how MarkLogic has made them successful. We will also share how we got buy-in to use MarkLogic as an XML database and application server – a challenging task at our Oracle, Java, and WebSphere shop!

Content, Community, and Agile Transformations at BusinessWeek

Isaac Sacolick, The McGraw-Hill Companies

BusinessWeek has taken an aggressive approach to transforming its digital products. Business Exchange, a new product launched in 2008 is a site where users can create and participate in business topics, develop profiles based on business interests, and network with other business leaders. The site showcases new community elements, content processing technologies, and agile practices that are now being leveraged across other products. Highlights and success factors of BusinessWeek’s transformation will be presented at this session.

Successfully Building and Transitioning to a Modern XML Content Infrastructure: Lessons Learned Along the Way

Beverly Jamison, American Psychological Association (APA)

One of the challenges faced by any business that survives more than a few years is dealing with the aging of systems of record for critical corporate intelligence. This problem is magnified in publishing operations where this intellectual property represents the actual product of the company. It is a big enough challenge to build a secure, cohesive new information infrastructure to deal with modern tools and then to move the information into that system. Successfully retiring the old systems without any loss of critical information or processes is one of the most underestimated challenges in Information Technology. The American Psychological Association found that XML throughout the publishing and presentation systems was not optional, but the degree of planning and process that went into the effort was (sometimes unfortunately). The APA chose to focus on building the infrastructure in MarkLogic server first and then build outward toward both production and delivery services. This talk will cover how APA applied lessons learn over several decades and fed them into planning the successful transition to an all XML workflow with an XML repository at the center.

Driving Politics in America at Congressional Quarterly

Kimberly Hallock, Melissa Howard, Congressional Quarterly

Using MarkLogic Server and Adobe InDesign, Congressional Quarterly created an automated publishing application for their data-driven digest Politics In America. MarkLogic Server assembles visually rich InDesign layouts using Xquery. The layouts are delivered to InDesign with Adobe AIR. These technologies are integrated in a push-button workflow that significantly reduces error and effort.

A Year Later and a Year Wiser: Lessons Learned from Implementing an Authoring and Delivery System Based on MarkLogic, SharePoint®, and Word®

Murry Christensen, JetBlue Airways

Last year JetBlue University presented a vision and plan for documenting a safety management system using commodity tools for authoring (Word) and collaboration (SharePoint), with document assembly and dynamic delivery provided by MarkLogic Server. This year, leaders at JetBlue University will talk about their lessons learned, and how the solution, now in production, is being used by a wide variety of authors to address critical compliance and safety requirements set out by JetBlue and the FAA.

To Boil or Not To Boil

Steve Kotrch, Simon & Schuster

When implementing a potentially disruptive technology like a Mark Logic server you need to proceed with caution. Implementing it wholesale and across an entire enterprise all at once is tantamount to trying to boil the ocean—you face certain failure.

At Simon & Schuster we proceeded in a stepwise fashion, starting slow and gathering speed and increasing complexity as we gained experience and skill. We began small, gathering and cataloging our author contracts, and have worked our way up through successive stages to the point where we are building a complex workflow tool that will automate the production of book covers and jackets. In the process we’ve learned how to mold XML to our needs, build loaders in Mark Logic and integrate it into our technology environment.

Federal SI Executive Panel

Dewey Houck, Boeing; Guy Fillipelli, Berico; Michael Kushin, ManTech; William Goodhue, Lockheed Martin

Systems Integrators and solution providers face pressing challenges to enable the Government to discover, analyze, and share information in very dynamic, mission critical environments. The use of XML has played a critical role in enabling a new set of solutions and capabilities for Federal customers. This panel of Federal industry executives will discuss trends in information sharing, and how they are using XML solutions to address these challenges.

Real Time Alerting of Time Critical Data

Mike Fagan, Booz Allen Hamilton

Rapid access to information helps ensure that time critical decisions are made with the right data. Booz Allen Hamilton was able to use the new alerting feature in Marklogic Server to provide user configurable alerts on time critical data within individual source documents or messages and aggregated collections. This presentation will illustrate how Booz Allen Hamilton has leveraged their existing Marklogic investment to rapidly develop new alerting functionality allowing end users to think about the time critical data audit/review problem in a different way. By replacing the repetitive search for interesting facts with an automatic push of user defined important data.

Wiley Custom Select: Delivering Custom Publishing to Users

Iam Williams, Wiley

Wiley Custom Select uses MarkLogic Server to offer users unprecedented access to Wiley content to create and customize specific learning packages that fit their exact needs. This application utilizes MarkLogic to manipulate PDF’s to create a cohesive custom package by giving users the opportunity to quickly search, preview, select and organize content at the title and chapter level. Customers will personalize the cover text and design, upload their own content, and choose from multiple print options or even an eBook delivery. Wiley Custom Select delivers customized and personalized content with efficiency, style and at the speed that exceeds current market expectations. This session will review the Custom Select application and discuss how MarkLogic has enabled Wiley to deliver this capability to users.

Information Fusion: Realizing Cost Benefits and Gains in Efficiency for Government

Jeremy Glesner and Guy Fillipelli, Berico

This session will discuss Berico Technologies' approach for using Mark Logic to fuse information from different repositories and analytical tools, facilitating the cross-talk between these systems. Discussion will also touch on the significant gains delivered from reduced modeling costs when dealing with dynamically structured content. Berico is also using this experience to act as a catalyst to reshape enrichment solutions for customers and partners throughout government.

Dealing with Electronic Discovery in a “Flat Earth” World

John Tredennick, CEO, Catalyst Repository Systems, Inc

Since the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, discovery of digital evidence, and the systems that store this information, have moved front and center on corporate legal’s radar. These rules are all encompassing, and the sanctions for non-compliance now reach into eight figures. Corporations with foreign offices and affiliates will find these laws especially challenging. John Tredennick, former trial lawyer and litigation partner at a national law firm, provides a primer on what you need to know about the new rules including tips on dealing with foreign discovery demands. He shows why many companies are turning to sophisticated search and analytics systems like MarkLogic Server to handle the increasing volume of discovery documents efficiently and effectively. Whether you are a corporate executive or a member of IS, you will walk away with practical tips on what you need to know to deal with your next law suit.

Matching Businesses with Consumers at the Leading Directory Service in the UK at Yell.com

Graeme Seaton, Yell

Part of international directory business Yell and one of the main sources of leads for businesses in the UK - currently attracts over 10 million unique visitors every month and is growing at a rate of 40% year on year. Yell.com allows users to discover relevant services and businesses near their preferred location. In the past year, the business has radically shifted its strategy to better compete in a content-rich world, and has rapidly developed the foundation for their future apps on MarkLogic. Learn about how Yell.com has, and plans to, utilize the unique capabilities of MarkLogic.

Why Publishers Should be Investing in a Downturn

Brian Bishop, Springer Science & Business Media
Shannon Holman, McGraw-Hill Higher Education
Bill Hughes, Pearson
Marilynn Jacobs, Quebecor World
Maureen McMahon, Kaplan Publishing

A recent IDC study indicates that companies that invest during a downturn exit 30% stronger than their competitors. This 50 minute panel will explore the pros and cons of investing during a downturn including specific investment areas where publishers can benefit. Given the pressures the publishing industry is already under from the declining print and advertising revenue this should be a lively discussion.

Breakout Sessions

Introduction to MarkLogic Server

Stephen Buxton, Director, Product Management and John Kreisa, Director, Product Marketing, Mark Logic

MarkLogic Server is used as the platform for a wide variety of content applications from information access and delivery to knowledge management and custom publishing. This session will provide an overview of the server and introduce the key features in MarkLogic Server that enable it to store, search, analyze and deliver XML content. This session will help you establish your technical foundation for the rest of the technology related sessions.

Building ReSTful Services with XQuery

Kurt Cagle, O'Reilly Media

This session explores the idea of using XML Databases (in this case the MarkLogic Server) in order to deploy fully RESTful publishing services that nonetheless can be used to power sophisticated processes. This session requires some basic knowledge of XPath and the MarkLogic infrastructure, and will look at the use of WebDAV primitives, XForms and XProc in order to power atom feeds, enterprise level web applications and more.

Excel-ing (and Word-ing) with MarkLogic Server and Microsoft Office

Pete Aven, Microsoft Integration Engineer, Mark Logic

Designed to maximize content assembly and reuse, the MarkLogic toolkits for Office provide content application authors a quick, simple way to deploy solutions in the ubiquitous interface their customers are already comfortable and familiar with. In this session we'll explore the Office toolkit components and features of MarkLogic Server 4.0 that allow us to extend Microsoft Office to create rich, powerful content applications.

Turning Search Upside Down: Out of the Box Alerting Applications

Wayne Feick, Lead Engineer, Mark Logic

Searching is the first step for many content applications but it shouldn’t be the last. From classification and content inference to notification, Alerting is a subtle but powerful feature. This session will walk you through what it takes to turn your search upside down and provide a taste of the content applications that you can be creating today.

GeoNews: Putting it All Together

Telly Stroumbis, Boeing

GeoNews is a prototype, integration effort, designed to explore and demonstrate some of the new features available in MarkLogic 4.0. This effort uses the Content Processing Framework to perform entity extraction and geo-coding of location based entities. This enriched data is then used to provide faceted navigation using textual and geospatial facets and data trending. This talk will provide code samples and lessons learned from this effort.

Feeding Your Content: Managing and Syndicating Content with AtomPub

Norm Walsh, Principal Technologist, Mark Logic

Content syndication allows you to deliver just the right content to any number of audiences. MarkLogic Server can easily search and transform content to deliver it in Atom or RSS feeds, but what if it could injest content using feed technologies as well, becoming a universal hub for all your syndication needs? In this session we will explore new capabilities in MarkLogic Server that allow it to act as an AtomPub server. An AtomPub server is an industry standard way to maintain syndication content. Whether you use this technology to deploy MarkLogic Server as a weblog platform “out of the box”, or build your own syndication applications on top of it, the sky's the limit!

Modeling Traditional Fielded Data and Relationships as XML Documents

Mira Bossowska, Cengage Learning

Migrating old fielded data from relational database to MarkLogic XML repository requires creative approach to data modeling. Scope of this modeling includes not only models for data traditionally stored in database tables but also models for relationships between entities. In addition, data normalization and standardization has to be applied during migration. New models have to be flexible and extensible for subsequent additional content set migrated into the new repository. And last but not least, new models should be easy to work with, both for humans and for machines. This presentation will describe an approach taken and models created.

Semantic Search: Using Meaning to Mine your Content Stores

Danielle Forsyth, Thetus

A semantic overlay on the Mark Logic content store allows users to see information from different perspectives, to capture and relate tacit knowledge and to characterize changing situations. This presentation focuses on characterizing people from different perspectives and shows the benefits of a high performance content store combined with a semantic knowledge base. XML, RDF and OWL combined benefits are shown in a visually stimulating demonstration using several sets of information mapped in a semantic SOA implementation.

MarkMail for the Enterprise

Jason Hunter, Principal Technologist & Ryan Grimm, Staff Consultant, MarkLogic

MarkMail.org has developed over the past year to become the largest collection of public emails on the internet, with over 36M emails, an average of 30,000 new messages per day, and over 1.5M visitors per month. Many of the users of MarkMail.org have asked how they could deploy MarkMail internally within the enterprise. Learn about the new features of MarkMail 2.0, how MarkMail is leveraged internally at MarkLogic, and how different visions of the MarkMail idea are being deployed with customers by our professional services organization to unlock the valuable knowledge in their corporate email lists.

New Release Potpourri

Ron Avnur, Vice President, Engineering, Mark Logic

With each release Mark Logic adds many small and large features for developers and administrators which make it easier to build applications and administer MarkLogic Server. This session technical session will introduce highlights for these new features many of which have come directly from customer requests. Ron Avnur, Vice President, Engineering will review new API calls and discuss how the functionality can benefit your MarkLogic deployment.

Search Applications Made Easier with MarkLogic Application Services

Justin Makeig, Product Manager – Developer Services and Micah Dubinko, Lead Engineer, Mark Logic

MarkLogic Application Services provide a powerful new way to build search applications with MarkLogic Server. Application Services provide new APIs and interactive tools to simplify building high-performance search applications and enhance developer productivity. Learn how you can leverage the Application Services Search API to easily provide customizable Google-style query parsing, faceted navigation and analytics, intelligent result "snippetting", and real-time search suggestions to your existing applications. We'll also show you how to use the interactive Application Builder to construct a full-featured search application from scratch without writing a single line of code.

Providing More Management and Control of Content with Library Services

Praveen Kankanala, Engineer, Mark Logic

A wide array of content types can be securely stored inside of MarkLogic Server however some of it requires more management and control. Now applications you build on MarkLogic Server can provide that additional level of control. This presentation will explore how our upcoming library services maintain document versions, user locks, and retention policies for your content. Find out how to control your workflow while reinforcing MarkLogic’s role as a platform for building content applications that enable re-use and re-purposing of content.

Search API Deep Dive

Colleen Whitney, Engineer, Mark Logic

Applications built on MarkLogic Server commonly involve search as a means of locating content and information. Come hear about the new Search API that provides highly configurable Google-style parsing, snippeting, facets and search for your applications. Mark Logic has always provided a powerful set of APIs for developing search applications, and the new Search API builds on these capabilities. This session will include a practical demonstration for application developers.

ReST Easy with New ReSTful Services

Justin Makeig, Product Manager – Developer Services, Mark Logic

MarkLogic Server is an ideal platform for deploying enterprise-class web services. With XML at its core and a full-featured application server built in, it provides a simple platform for developing content-rich services. The next release of MarkLogic Server introduces several new features that make building ReST-style web services easier. Learn about what Representational State Transfer (ReST) is and how you can leverage this architecture in your MarkLogic content applications.

Breakout Sessions

Gaining Insight Through Analytics

Kelly Stirman, Information Access & Delivery Sage, Mark Logic

Understanding and getting to the important information that lies beneath a mountain of content can be challenging. Powerful analytic capabilities built into MarkLogic Server can shed light on the right information and be used to guide users via rich navigation options. In this session we will review the analytic features and discuss how they are used to give your users the insight and guidance they need when faced with massive amounts of information.

Design Considerations for High-Availability Deployments

Michael Blakeley, Performance Expert, Mark Logic

As more customer facing and mission critical content applications are built the need for guaranteed availability grows with them. Users have come to expect 24/7 accesses to their content and you need to deliver. MarkLogic Server contains many features that enable it to be deployed in a high-availability manner. This session will discuss the features and considerations when deploying MarkLogic Server for high-availability.

Real World Applications of Geospatial Search in Content

Mary Holstege, Principal Engineer – Geospatial Services, Mark Logic

Geospatial information is increasingly included within content yet not exploited. With the increasingly mobile user delivery of content in a geospatial context is more important than ever. Fortunately MarkLogic Server contains built-in geospatial query and indexing features to allow organizations to fully exploit this aspect of their information. This session will review real-world scenarios of how customers are taking advantage of geospatial markup to deliver content in a more focused and relevant context.

Designing For Scale: Strategies for Maximum Performance

Michael Blakeley, Performance Expert, Mark Logic

MarkLogic Server was designed for large content sets, from hundreds of gigabytes to hundreds of terabytes. Real-world customer experience has proven its ability to scale as content sizes grow, providing consistent and predictable performance. This session will presented by Mark Logics top performance expert and draws from his experience to walk through deployment strategies and considerations.

Automating MarkLogic Application Deployment and Configuration

David Steiner, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

This session will discuss the principles for automating the deployment, configuration and management of MarkLogic XQuery applications in enterprise environments. A demonstration will be given of an XML language and application for deploying MarkLogic applications and configurations. This makes deployment easy and repeatable across multiple environments such as Development, Test, Stage, and Production. We will also discuss the concepts of temporal verses declarative build models, clustering abstractions, un-install, continuous build, and application monitoring.

MarkLogic in the Enterprise: Best Practices for Successful Integration of MarkLogic Solutions in Mission-Critical Architectures

Fernando Mesa, Principal Technologist, Mark Logic

As content solutions move from a disconnected, siloed architecture into the core of corporation’s infrastructure, the need for integration with enterprise systems grow more important. In this session, you will learn how to integrate MarkLogic into a Service Oriented Architecture and some of the middleware that enables enterprise interoperability such as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Business Process Management (BPM) solutions. We will also review integration of MarkLogic with RDBMS and Message Queuing Systems, and will share pitfalls to avoid when integrating these solutions.

The Content Processing Framework – Mark Logic's Best Kept Secret

Stephen Buxton, Director, Product Management, Mark Logic

The content processing framework (CPF) is a feature of MarkLogic Server that allows you to set up process flows to automatically enrich and improve your content. In this session we will show how some popular server features use CPF under the covers - entity enrichment, conversion, and modular document services all use CPF. Then we will explore how you can use CPF directly to improve the way you process, manage, and enrich content. You will see live demos and code snippets, and you’ll come away with an appreciation for CPF, one of MarkLogic Server’s unsung heroes.

An MVC-Driven Web Application Framework: Why and How

Eric Palmitesta, University of Toronto

MVC is a design pattern which promotes organization of code and file structure by separating presentation from domain logic. While there are dozens of MVC frameworks for languages such as Java and Ruby, nothing similar exists for developers building complex applications in XQuery. XQMVC is a new XQuery web application framework which leverages MVC design principles as well as new capabilities made available in MarkLogic Server 4.1 to offer the foundation for a clean and well-organized XQuery-driven website. Highlights include friendly URLs, infinitely nestable templates (allowing visual sections of a site to be encapsulated in reusable XHTML fragments), and a simple but effective i18n engine (to externalize and manage text fragments using a web-based editor).

Breakout Sessions

Maximize Brand Impact: Use MarkLogic Server to Provide Consistent Customer Experience by Managing Operational and Learning Content

Joe Mihalik, Flatirons Solutions

MarkLogic solutions to date have largely focused on content mining, dynamic delivery, and custom publishing. Increasingly, organizations realize that content can play a critical role in managing the overall brand by helping ensure that customers have consistent experiences whenever they touch the organization. Content such as operational documentation, training content, and policies and procedures is key to enabling employees to provide consistent customer experiences. In this session, learn how Flatirons Solutions and MarkLogic have helped companies solve this problem by making it easier to develop and deliver the content needed to drive and improve core operational business processes.

How to Understand What You Can’t Read: Multilingual Document Monitoring and Analysis with Basis

Steve Cohen, Basis Technology

Basis Technology builds multilingual technology for intelligence, compliance and information discovery. Learn how you can connect foreign and cross-language analysis to Marklogic Server based solutions and how you can access information in languages you can't read or speak. Basis will demonstrate document monitoring combined with compliance filtering and due-diligence capability, built around Marklogic Server and Basis Technology's foreign language name technology.

Web 2.0 & Content-rich Applications – Pitfalls and Best Practices to Make Your Applications Robust

Behzad Ilchi, Vice President and Surajit Bhattacharjee, Associate Director of Technology Virtusa

Web 2.0 has set the standard for what customers and communities expect from web sites. Today, content-rich applications must provide capabilities far beyond simple search and retrieval. Sites must be content rich, interactive and engaging. The best applications allow users to “work with the content” providing an integrated view of disparate information sources and allowing users to analyze, visualize, navigate and collaborate around content. This session will highlight challenges, pitfalls, experiences and best practices Virtusa has gained from its work with major publishers in the areas of application design, information architecture and user experience.

Wrapping-Up Content Services in a Neat Package with MarkLogic Server

Jerry Hawk, Capax Global and Ron Gagnon, Capax Alpha

Jerry and Ron will discuss how MarkLogic, with the appropriate service wrappers are simplifying the content technology landscape. Never before has a single product enabled companies to transform, extract, aggregate/archive, retrieve, and distribute content utilizing a single technology. Leveraging their experience across hundreds of content implementations across all major verticals and expertise in large scale SOA solutions you will learn how MarkLogic Server fits neatly into these architectures. They will also discuss the ROI as it relates to utilizing MarkLogic as the “cosmic normalizer” instead of normalizing at the source and the time to market value as it relates in a financial services environment.