Balisage 2014 Biographies

Clifford Anderson
Clifford Anderson is Director for Scholarly Communications at the Vanderbilt University Library in Nashville, TN. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and a M.S. in Library and Information Science from the Pratt Institute, among other degrees. He aspires to be a polyglot digital humanist.

Ardie Bausenbach
As a technology planning specialist in the Library of Congress’ Integrated Library System Program Office (Library Services), Ardie Bausenbach manages diverse projects involving search and discovery, EAD finding aids, and persistent identification. She co-chairs the Library’s Collections Discovery Group, which collaborates on shaping the Library’s collection access systems, with special focus on Find/Discover, Select/Identify, and Obtain functions. For the past two years she has participated in a Library-wide review of preferred formats for LC collections, serving as chair of the team that evaluates textual works and musical scores. Ardie developed and maintains LCCN Permalink (an SRU/Z39.50 application that makes actionable info:LCCNs for the LC Online Catalog), and she supports the Library’s OpenURL resolver and handle server applications. In 2010, she oversaw development of the Library’s redesigned EAD finding aids search system (findingaids.loc.gov), an XQuery-based application that wraps EAD XML documents into METS objects, then stores, indexes, and displays these objects from a native XML data store platform (currently eXist). She also currently serves on the NISO JATS Standing Committee. When not working at LC, Ardie collects American art and helps administer her family’s Tombstone, Arizona tourism businesses.

Robin Berjon
Robin Berjon is a freelance consultant carrying out research, prototyping, and standardisation in Web, mobile, and XML technologies. He has worked on both Web and XML standards for over a decade, and is currently trying to herd HTML5 to Recommendation as part of the W3C team. He lives in Paris, France, with his wife, two daughters, and a rather idiotic cat.

George Bina
George Bina is founder of SyncroSoft, makers of the oXygenXML product. George is a mathematician by training. George lives and works in Criova, Romania. When not contributing to open-source projects, George enjoys travel with his family and taking selfies of himself working in exotic locations.

Abel Braaksma
Abel Braaksma is owner of Exselt (http://exselt.net) and the consultancy and outsourcing firm Abrasoft (http://abrasoft.net). He designed and created the new streaming XSLT 3.0 processor Exselt together with other developers. He has more than 15 years experience with XML and related technologies and is currently an Invited Expert of the XSLT and XPath working groups at W3C. He can be contacted about anything related to XML, XSLT, C#, Java or F# through at info@abrasoft.net; specific inquiries on the Exselt processor can be send to info@exselt.net. For his musings on technologies in general, you can visit his blog at Under My Hat.

Pat Case
Pat Case is a Specialist in Legislative Information Systems Management for the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress. A librarian specializing in full-text search, she works on Congress’s legislative search system, monitors data and document transfers, writes complex searches, and supports users. She was a primary editor of the World Wide Consortium (W3C) XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0 Recommendation.

Domenic Denicola
Domenic Denicola is a software engineer and standardista stationed on the Google Chrome team. He enjoys running out slightly ahead of the current state-of-the-art in browser technology, coordinating, prototyping, and standardizing on tools and APIs for driving the web forward. Domenic serves on the Ecma TC39 committee in charge of standardizing JavaScript, as well as the W3C Technical Architecture Group; in his free time he contributes to the Node.js ecosystem.

Steven J. DeRose
Steve DeRose has been working with electronic document and hypertext systems since joining Andries van Dam’s FRESS project in 1979. He holds degrees in Computer Science and in Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Brown University.

He co-founded Electronic Book Technologies to build the first SGML browser and retrieval system, "DynaText", and has been deeply involved in document standards including XML, TEI, HyTime, HTML 4, XPath, XPointer, EAD, Open eBook, OSIS, NLM and others. He has served as Chief Scientist of Brown University’s Scholarly Technology Group and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science. He has written many papers, two books, and eleven patents. Most recently he has been working as a consultant in text analytics.

Phil Fearon
Phil Fearon is a software developer specialising in XML comparison solutions at DeltaXML. In addition to his day job he is also the main contributor to a number of small XML tools associated projects including XMLQuire, PathEnq and XMLSpectrum. Previous work includes running his own XML solutions company, helping productise the Saxon-CE XSLT 2.0 processor for Saxonica Ltd and working briefly as the joint editor for the EXPath ZIP specification.

Betty Harvey
As President of Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. since 1995, Ms. Harvey has led many federal government and commercial enterprises in planning and executing their migration to the use of structured information for their critical functions. She has helped develop strategic XML solutions for her clients. Ms. Harvey has been instrumental in developing industry XML standards. She is the co-author of "Professional ebXML Foundations" published by Wrox. Ms. Harvey founded the Washington, DC Area XML Users Group. Ms. Harvey is a member of "The XML Guild" and was a coauthor of the book "Advanced XML Applications From the Experts at The XML Guild" published by Thomson.

Faegheh Hasibi
Faegheh Hasibi is a PhD student as Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Her research is focused on semi-structured information retrieval, particularly on overlapping structures and knowledge bases as RDF graphs. She received her M.Sc. in computer science from University of Gothenburg and her B.S. from Bahonar University of Kerman.

Claus Huitfeldt
Claus Huitfeldt is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen, Norway. He was founding Director (1990-2000) of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, for which he developed the text encoding system MECS as well as the editorial methods for the publication of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass - The Bergen Electronic Edition (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Eliot Kimber
Eliot Kimber has been doing generalized markup longer than most humans have been alive. Eliot’s most recent professional focus is on the application of the DITA standard to the requirements of professional publishers. Eliot is a founding member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and active contributor to the DITA standard. Eliot maintains the DITA For Publishers open source project. When not wrangling tags to his will, Eliot trains in Aikido and skateboards when he can. Eliot lives in Austin, Texas.

Martin Kuhn
Martin Kuhn is a graduate student at the University Munich (TUM). He is now working as a programmer in the field of mobile games.

Robin La Fontaine
Robin La Fontaine is the founder and CEO of DeltaXML. He holds an Engineering Science degree from Oxford University and an MSc in Computer Science. His background includes computer aided design software and he has been addressing the challenges and opportunities associated with information change for many years.

David Lee
David Lee has over 30 years’ experience in the software industry responsible for many major projects in small and large companies including Sun Microsystems, IBM, Centura Software (formerly Gupta.), Premenos, Epiphany (formerly RightPoint), WebGain, Nexstra, Epocrates, MarkLogic. As Lead Engineer at MarkLogic, Inc., Mr. Lee is responsible for maintaining and enhancing the core Enterprise NoSQL Database server.

Joshua Lubell
Joshua Lubell is a computer scientist in the NIST Engineering Laboratory’s Systems Integration Division. His interests include model-based engineering, cybersecurity, long-term preservation of digital data, information modeling, and XML and other markup technologies. He received the U.S. Department of Commerce Silver Medal for his leadership in developing ISO 10303-203, a standard for representation and exchange of computer-aided designs. He represents NIST on the Technical Advisory Committee of PDES, Inc., an industry/government/university consortium committed to deploying product data standards.

John Lumley
A Cambridge engineer by background, John Lumley created the AI group at Cambridge Consultants in the early 1980s and then joined HPLabs Bristol as one of its founding members. He worked there for 25 years, managing and contributing in a variety of software/systems fields, latterly specialising in XSLT-based document engineering, in which he subsequently gained a PhD. He is currently helping develop the Saxon XSLT processor for Saxonica.

Yves Marcoux
Yves Marcoux has been a faculty member at EBSI, University of Montréal, since 1991. He is mainly involved in teaching, research, standardization, and international cooperation activities in the field of document informatics. Prior to his appointment at EBSI, Dr. Marcoux worked for 10 years in systems maintenance and development, in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. He obtained his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from Université de Montréal in 1991. His main research interests are intertextual semantics, the design of communication, markup languages and digital humanities.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is the resident XML guy at Condesign AB in Göteborg, Sweden. His information structures and solutions are used by Volvo Cars, Ericsson, and many others. His favourite XML specification remains XLink so quite a few of his frequent talks and presentations on XML focus on linking and various aspects of reuse.

Ari spends some of his spare time playing with old 35/70 mm film projectors and has a respectable collection of Dolby cinema processors, which goes some way towards explaining why he wanted to automate cinemas using XML, once upon a time. He has now fully accepted that it’s too late.

Silvio Peroni
Silvio Peroni holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and he is a post-doc at the University of Bologna. He is an expert in document markup and semantic descriptions of bibliographic entities using OWL ontologies. He is one of the main developers of SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies (http://purl.org/spar) that permit RDF descriptions of bibliographic entities, citations, reference collections and library catalogues, the structural and rhetorical components of documents, and roles, statuses and workflows in publishing. Among his research interests are Semantic Web technologies, markup languages for complex documents, design patterns for digital documents and ontology modelling, and automatic processes of analysis and segmentation. In particular, his recent works concern the empirical analysis of the nature of citations, the study of visualisation and browsing interfaces for semantic data, and the development of ontologies to manage, integrate and query bibliographic information according to temporal and contextual constraints.

Wendell Piez
Wendell Piez is an independent consultant specializing in XML and XSLT, based in Rockville MD.

Francesco Poggi
Francesco Poggi graduated with honors with a master thesis on markup languages and the Semantic Web titled “Resolution and linearization of overlap in markup languages”. Starting from January 2012, he is a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Bologna. His research activity is focused on web technologies, markup languages and information visualization.

Liam R. E. Quin
Liam Quin is currently the XML Activity lead at the World Wide Web Consortium, publishers of the XML specification. He has a background in computer science, digital typography, markup, and computer representation of text going back to the 1980s, worked at SoftQuad Inc. in the SGML days, was part of the development of XML, and today is also involved in the W3C Digital Publishing Activity and in the CSS Working Group, helping CSS to mature enough to take on more of the work of XSL-FO. Liam also does some part-time consulting, mostly in XML and information related areas, from his home in rural South-East Ontario in Canada.

Ken Rawson
Ken has worked in the STM publishing industry for over twenty years in various electronic publishing roles. Most recently, Ken led the effort to create and standardize all IEEE publications content in several customized JATS XML formats, with the help of Mulberry Technologies. This multi-year project included eleven DTDs and schemas. He is currently working on and interested in automated math and XML QC processes and the “standardized” JATS tagging of journal and conference articles.

Marouane Sayih
Marouane Sayih is a PhD student and a research assistant at Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany. He studied informatics at the TU München. Currently he is working towards a PhD in applied informatics focusing on modelling in document engineering. Since June 2011 he is managing the faculty graduate center of the Faculty of Informatics, CeDoSIA (www.in.tum.de/cedosia).

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is the founder of Black Mesa Technologies LLC, a consultancy specializing in the use of descriptive markup to help memory institutions preserve cultural heritage information for the long haul. He has served as co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, and the XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 specification. He holds a doctorate in comparative literature.

B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML and SGML. Ms. Usdin has been working with SGML since 1985 and has been a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs the Balisage conference. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas, and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in government and industry. Projects include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor documentation; historical and archival materials. Distribution formats have included print books, magazines, and journals, and both web- and media-based electronic publications. She is co-chair of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html

Benito van der Zander
Benito van der Zander is a graduate student at the University of Lübeck, working on the Ph.D. project "Algorithmics Of Causal Inference" investigating algorithms for Pearl’s causality framework. Before his enrollment in that graduate school, he has developed the open-source XQuery engine Xidel. He received a computer science B.S. from the University of Düsseldorf, and a M.S. from the RWTH Aachen.

Fabio Vitali
Fabio Vitali is Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Bologna, where he teaches Web Technologies and Human-Computer Interaction. His interests lie in models and languages for document management and hypertext support, and has published more than 60 papers in national and international venues. He is member of the W3C Working Group on XML Schema, and member of the scientific committee of several conferences and journals in Web engineering and technologies. He is author of important standards in the legislative XML Domain, and work on issues related to digital publishing, Web technologies and Semantic Web technologies.

Priscilla Walmsley
Priscilla Walmsley is a senior consultant and managing director at Datypic, specializing in XML architecture and implementation. She is an expert in XML core technologies (XQuery, XSLT, XML Schema), NIEM implementation, content management and service-oriented architectures. Priscilla is the author of Definitive XML Schema (Prentice Hall PTR, 2012), and XQuery (O’Reilly Media, 2007). In addition, she co-authored Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA (Prentice Hall 2008).

Norman Walsh
Norman Walsh is a Lead Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation where he helps to develop APIs and tools for the world’s leading enterprise NoSQL database. Norm is also an active participant in a number of standards efforts worldwide: he is chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group at the W3C where he is also co-chair of the XML Core Working Group. At OASIS, he is chair of the DocBook Technical Committee.

David R.R. Webber
With Oracle focusing on NIEM, Open Data, XML, JSON, BPM and developing interoperable information exchanges. Semantic and rule aspects along with collaborative domain dictionary development. Use of OASIS standards and open source tools (CAM project). David is on the NIEM NTAC and knows XML intimately since 1997 and wrote the first open source solution for NIEM and Open-Data. David provides XML, SOA and eBusiness consulting to a variety of eGovernment and Open Data initiatives across Federal, State and Local entities. David is a senior member of the ACM and holds a degree in Physics with Computing.

Lauren Wood
Lauren Wood is Senior Product Manager at Design Science, Inc., concentrating on the MathFlow suite of MathML editing and formatting applications and involved in other company projects where her years of experience as consultant, analyst, or product/project manager in areas ranging from healthcare standards (with the Lantana Consulting Group), identity and security (with Sun Microsystems), and XML authoring and publishing (with XMetaL) are relevant. In addition, she is the Course Director for the XML Summer School where she also teaches, and a speaker at other conferences.

Joseph C. Wicentowski
Joseph C. Wicentowski is Digital History Advisor in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State, where he leads initiatives to digitize and publish historical publications and datasets. He has been using XML since 2007, when he began work on history.state.gov, a largely TEI- and XQuery-based site powered by eXist-db. He holds a Ph.D. in modern East Asian history from Harvard University.

Kate Zwaard
Kate Zwaard is a software developer who has spent more than ten years building digital repositories for federal agencies. In her current role in the Repository Development Center at the Library of Congress, she manages a portfolio of software projects that provide services for the full lifecycle of digital content. She has written and spoken widely on topics ranging from software development to digital preservation. Prior to joining LC, she helped conceptualize and develop the Federal Digital System at the Government Printing Office. She has chaired the PREMIS editorial committee and the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group. Kate’s hobbies include quilting, Bayesianism, and microbiology.