Balisage 2009 Author/Speaker Biographies

Bruce Todd Bauman
Bruce Bauman's first introduction to markup was in the early 1990's where he oversaw the tagging of foreign language dictionaries in compliance with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards and led a development team that produced multi-lingual retrieval tool for those dictionaries based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Mr. Bauman became interested in using SGML and then XML to solve entrenched interoperability problems. This led him to look seriously at information / data modeling and now ontology for answers to interloperabilities' persistent questions. Twelve years later he has yet to solve those entrenched problems (this is really hard).

Mr. Bauman has been attending [off and on] the Balisage series of conferences since the HyTime days, and has watched XML grow up over its 11 year history.

Mr. Bauman holds a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science.

Anne Brüggemann-Klein
Anne Brüggemann-Klein is a professor of computer science at Technische Universität München. She received her PhD in Mathematics from Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Münster and her Habilitation in Computer Science from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Her research interest is in document engineering. Earlier work, part of which is cited in the W3C XML Recommendation, focuses on the formal language theory foundation of document languages. Current research explores to what extent novel publishing applications can be composed from appropriately configured XML software with a minimum of programming. The goal is to discover principles, patterns and procedures that reduce complexity and ensure sustainability when developing and maintaining Web applications.

Kurt Cagle
Kurt Cagle is a writer, information architect and developer specializing in XML and Web Technologies. He has authored more than fifteen books and hundreds of articles on XML based technologies such as XSLT, SVG, XUL, XForms, computer ethics and more, and writes the blog UnderstandingXML.com. He has most recently been working with the Firefox browser and Mozilla technologies, as well as XML based languages such as XBL, trying to push what he sees as the re-emergence of client-based programming. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and daughters, where he can usually be found staring out the window at the falling rain while drinking coffee at local coffeehouses.

Jacques Durand
Jacques Durand is a software architect at Fujitsu America, Inc. with long-time involvement in XML standard organizations, a member of the OASIS Technical Advisory Board, and a contributor to XML user consortiums such as RosettaNet and OAGI. He has extensive experience in XML-related testing, is chair of both the Test Assertions Guideline OASIS committee and the Testing and Monitoring of Internet Exchanges (TaMIE) committee. He has been leading testing activities for years in the WS-Interoperability consortium and in the ebXML technical committee. He earned a Ph.D. in rule-based systems and logic-programming from Nancy University, France.

Scott Durno
Scott Durno graduated in October of 2004 with a Bachelor of Computer Science with Honours degree from Acadia University. He is currently studying at Acadia University pursuing his masters degree in computer science.

Peter Flynn
Peter Flynn manages the academic advisory and electronic publishing unit at University College Cork, Ireland, and also runs text management consultancy, Silmaril. He was a member of the W3C's XML Special Interest Group and a member of the IETF's Working Group on HTML. He is maintainer of the XML FAQ and author of The World-Wide Web Handbook (ITCP, 1995) and Understanding SGML and XML Tools (Kluwer, 1998). He is completing a belated PhD in software usability, and in his copious spare time he surfs, cooks, and listens to early music.

Christopher Fry
Christopher Fry graduated in May 2009 from Acadia University with a Bachelor of Computer Science with Honours. He will be returning to Acadia University to pursue his masters degree in computer science.

Florent Georges
Florent Georges is a freelance IT consultant in Brussels who has been involved in the XML world for 10 years, especially within the XSLT and XQuery communities. His main interests are in the field of XSLT and XQuery extensions and libraries, packaging, unit and functional testing, and portability between several processors. Since the beginning of 2009, he has worked on EXPath, to define "standard" extension function libraries that can be used in XPath (so in XSLT, XQuery and XProc as well).

Stephen Green
Stephen Green is an Associate Director of Document Engineering Services, an international consortium of experts supporting universal business interoperability through the use of open standards. His expertise is in finance, business documents and software development for business and financial applications. He has specialized in legacy systems and modern electronic business trends and their impact on small and medium sized enterprises. Stephen has been active in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for seven years, serving on as many technical committees. He is currently editing the Test Assertions Guidelines of the OASIS technical committee of that name. He previously led the first efforts to provide a small business subset conformance profile for the OASIS Universal Business Language, version 1.0.

Betty Harvey
As President of Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. since 1995, Betty 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. Over the past 14 years she has helped develop strategic XML solutions for her clients. Ms. Harvey has been instrumental in developing industry XML standards. Ms. Harvey is a member of OASIS Open and is currently an active participant in the Universal Business Language initiative. Previously she was a member of the Core Components subcommittee of the ebXML initiative. She is the co-author of Professional ebXML Foundations published by Wrox. Ms. Harvey founded the Washington, DC Area SGML/XML Users Group in 1995. She still coordinates the users group which is the longest standing XML users group. Ms Harvey is also a member of "The XML Guild" and recently co-authored the book Advanced XML Applications From the Experts at The XML Guild published by Thomson. Currently, Ms. Harvey is working with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on developing future system evolution for the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) system.

Claus Huitfeldt
Claus Huitfeldt is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen. His research interests are within philosophy of language, philosophy of technology, text theory, editorial philology and markup theory. 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). He has been active in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) since 1991, and was centrally involved in the foundation of the TEI Consortium. Huitfeldt was Research Director (2000-2002) of Aksis (Section for Culture, Language and Information Technology at the Bergen University Research Foundation).

Daniel Jettka
Daniel Jettka is working on his Master degree in linguistics after acquiring a BA in text technology. During his studies he has worked together with Andreas Witt, Dieter Metzing, Daniela Goecke and Maik Stührenberg in the Sekimo project of the Research Group 437 Text-technological modelling of information funded by the German Research Foundation on different XSLT stylesheets for the handling and transformation of overlapping markup.

Michael Kay
Michael Kay is the editor of the W3C XSLT specification, and is a member of the XQuery and XML Schema Working Groups. He is the developer of the Saxon XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema processor. He is the author of XSLT Programmer's Reference (now in its fourth edition) and a contributor to many other books.

He is a member of the Advisory Board for Balisage 2009, and Chair of the associated Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently.

Serm Kulvatunyou
Serm Kulvatunyou is currently a Standard and Product Architect at the Oracle's Application Integration Architecture (AIA) division. Formerly, he was a guest researcher the at the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At NIST, he has designed and implemented semantics testing and frameworks for design of document model and instance validation in the contenxt of an e-business testbed using XML and related technologies. He has been an active participants in several standard bodies such as UN/CEFACT and OASIS. His current interests are in architecture and best practices methodology to enterprise data model for reusable and interoperable Service-Oriented Architecture. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in 2001.

David Lee
David Lee has over 20 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), and WebGain. As principal senior software engineer at Epocrates, Inc., Mr Lee is responsible for managing data integration, storage, retrieval, and processing of clinical knowledge databases for the leading clinical information provider.

Key career contributions include Real-time AIX OS extensions for optimizing transmission of real-time streaming video (IBM), secure encrypted EDI over internet email (Premenos), porting the Centura Team Desktop system to Solaris (Gupta, Centura), and optimizations of large Enterprise CRM systems (Epiphany), and authoring xmlsh, an open source scripting language for XML.

Eric Lemoine
Eric Lemoine has co-led the XML acceleration program at LSI (formerly Tarari) for the last six years. Dr. Lemoine is the lead inventor of many XML hardware-related patents. His main research interest is the creation of very high performance purpose-built devices for machine-to-machine interoperability. He received his PhD from the Université de Montpellier for his work on Reconfigurable Hardware, working closely with pioneers in the field such as Professor Jean Vuillemin.

Michael Leventhal
Michael Leventhal has co-led the XML acceleration program at LSI (formerly Tarari) for the last six years. Mr. Leventhal has been active in the XML developer community since its inception, published many articles on XML, wrote the first book on the use of XML for the Internet, and participated in W3C workgroups. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley.

Joshua Lubell
Josh Lubell uses information technology to solve manufacturing engineering and e-business software interoperability problems. He is particularly interested in long-term retention of digital data and was awarded the Department of Commerce Silver Medal for his leadership in developing ISO 10303-203:2008, a standard for representation and exchange of computer-aided designs.

Yves Marcoux
Yves Marcoux has been a faculty member at EBSI, University of Montréal, since 1991. He is mainly involved in teaching and research activities in the field of document informatics. Prior to his appointment at EBSI, he had 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 the University of Montréal in 1991. His main research interests are document semantics, structured document implementation methodologies, and information retrieval in structured documents. Through GRDS, his research group at EBSI, he has been the principal architect for the Governmental Framework for Integrated Document Management, a project funded by the National Archives of Québec and by the Québec Treasury Board.

Charlie McCay
Charlie McCay has been closely involved in defining how XML is used in the HL7 healthcare interoperability specifications for ten years. He is Chair of the HL7 Technical Steering Committee and on the HL7 international board. As well as international standards work, he has been responsible for specifying the way XML is used in many English national projects including the transfer of primary care records (GP2GP), Electronic Prescribing, and the Retinal Screening Program. He is currently working on Standards conformance methods for the NHS in England, and convergence between international standards groups in the healthcare sector.

Jan Krzysztof Miziołek
Jan Krzysztof Miziołek works for the University of Warsaw, Poland. Dr. Miziołek received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Technical University of Lodz, Poland in 1981. He worked on design and implementation of a high-level programming language, LOGLAN-82. His current research includes XML compression and encryption.

Tomasz Müldner
Tomasz Müldner is a professor of computer science at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, one of Canada's top undergraduate universities. He has received numerous teaching awards, including the prestigious Acadia University Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award in 1996. He is the author of several books and numerous research papers. Dr. Müldner received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw, Poland in 1975. His current research includes XML compression and encryption, and website internationalization.

Quyen L. Nguyen
Quyen Nguyen is currently working in the Systems Engineering Division of the ERA Program Management Office at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Before joining the National Archives, he had worked for telecommunications software companies. His experience is in developing software systems for large scale deployment. He has a BS in Computer and Information Science and Applied Mathematics from the University of Delaware and a MS in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Michael Odling-Smee
With a background in Experimental Atomic & Molecular Physics, Dr. Michael Odling-Smee switched to IT in 2000 where he started his career in a small Java software consultancy start-up before moving on to Integration architecture in both B2B and Health care arenas. As is the nature with integration, he has been involved in XML message integration design using many XML based technologies - XSD, XSL, SOAP, WS-*, ebXML, BPEL and XML Acceleration appliances. Michael also started an XML based requirements management system (http://www.xml-solutions.com/products.html) that uses XSD to define an XML data model for requirements and use-cases with XSL and XSL:FO to derive multiple views on the data. In May 2007 Michael co-founded XML Solutions Ltd., a specialist XML and Systems Integration Consultancy.

Wendell Piez
Wendell Piez enjoys fresh herbs and vegetables from his garden in Rockville, MD.

Liam Quin
Liam Quin has been involved with declarative, descriptive markup since the early 1980s. He wrote his open-source text retrieval system and first distributed it in the late 1980s.

He has worked at the World Wide Web Consortium since 2001, where he is XML Activity Lead, or, informally, Mrs XML.

Tom Rutt
Tom Rutt is Standards Manager at Fujitsu America, Inc. with long-time involvement in XML standard organizations and participation in several Web Services standard committees. He has extensive experience in XML-related testing, and has been involved in the WS-Interoperability consortium for years, more recently designing and developing testing tools for profile conformance. He is also member of the OMG Architecture Board.

Felix Sasaki
From 1993 until 1999, Felix Sasaki studied Japanese and Linguistics in Berlin, Nagoya (Japan) and Tokyo. After 1999 he worked in the Department of Computational Linguistics and Text-technology, at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), where he finished his PhD in 2004. The PhD dealt with the integration of heterogeneous linguistic resources using XML-based (e.g.linguistic corpora) and RDF-based (e.g. lexical, conceptual models) representations. Felix joined the W3C staff in April 2005 to work in the areas of Internationalization, Web Services and Media Annotations. Since March 2009 he has held a Professor position at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany, in the area of libraries, archives and documentation.

Desmond Schmidt
Desmond Schmidt has a BA from the University of Queensland in Classical Greek Language and Ancient History (1980) and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, in Classical Greek papyrology (1987). He has worked at the Cambridge Wittgenstein Archive making an edition of Wittgenstein, as a Computer Associate at the Wellcome/CRC (biosciences) Institute. In Australia he has worked as a software developer on a commercial license managment system for Mac OSX, and on the Leximancer data mining application. He currently works at the Information Security Institute, Queensland University of Technology, as a software engineer. Since 2002 he has worked with Domenico Fiormonte and the Digital Variants team developing tools for viewing and editing multi-version texts. He has recently submitted a second PhD at the ITEE School at UQ entitled Multiple Versions and Overlap in Digital Text.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is an independent consultant for Black Mesa Technologies LLC. He currently serves as an editor of the W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1.

Jens Stegnam
Jens Stegmann studied Linguistics, Psychology and Computer Science at Bielefeld University. Parts of his paper on TEI Feature Structures as a representation format deal with aspects of his Master's thesis.

Maik Stührenberg
Maik Stührenberg studied Computational Linguistics at Bielefeld University. He worked four years as a research assistant at Giessen University in different text-technological projects together with Henning Lobin and Georg Rehm. He now works as a research assistant at Bielefeld University together with Andreas Witt, Dieter Metzing and Daniela Goecke in the Sekimo project of the Research Group Text-technological modelling of information funded by the German Research Foundation. His main research interests include specifications for structuring multiple annotated data and query languages and query processing.

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 and was co-editor of Markup Languages: Theory & Practice published by the MIT Press. 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. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html

Joseph Waller
Joseph Waller is co-owner and Director of the Integration Consultancy XML Solutions Ltd (http://www.xml-solutions.com). He started his career developing hedge derivative systems for Halifax Bank before moving onto architectual consultancy work and eventually specializing in XML and Healthcare integration. Developing integration strategies across finance and UK government systems, recent work has focused on England's NHS Spine and related parts of the National Programme for IT.

Norman Walsh
Norman Walsh is a Principal Technologist in the Information & Media group at Mark Logic Corporation where he assists in the design and deployment of advanced content applications. Mr. Walsh 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.

Before joining Mark Logic, he participated in XML-related projects and standards efforts at Sun Microsystems. With more than a decade of industry experience, Mr. Walsh is well known for his work on DocBook and a wide range of open source projects. He is the principle author of DocBook: The Definitive Guide.

Ann Wrightson
Ann Wrightson has been working with markup since 1978, from typesetting languages and fielded records through generic coding to SGML and XML. She has experience in using markup for interoperability and platform-independence across a wide range of content including published reference works, technical publications, e-learning, legal codes and materials, and semantic interoperability standards for information systems. Since 2004 she has worked principally with interoperability in healthcare, initially on the information systems supplier side and more recently in NHS Wales. She has a particular concern for usability of interoperability standards within a diverse implementation community, and has pursued that concern in the international HL7 community through involvement in innovations to introduce service-oriented integration and an adaptable enterprise architecture framework. She has been a member of the Board of HL7 UK since 2007, from 2009 as HL7 UK Technical Committee Chair.

Mohamed Zergaoui
Mohamed Zergaoui is the CTO and founder of Innovimax. He is an active member of W3C WG related to processing (XSLT, XQuery, XProc) and of ISO DSDL. He is currently part of a big research framework in France with public funding for streaming and parallel processing.