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Balisage
Authors and Speakers
Murray Altheim
John Arwe
Syd Bauman
Jon Bosak
Peter Brown
Kurt Cagle
Maurizio Casimirri
Marc de Graauw
Patrick Durusau
Daniela Goecke
Sandro Hawke
Ralph A. Hertlein
G. Ken Holman
Claus Huitfeldt
Deborah A. Lapeyre
Jianhui Li
Susan Malaika
Yves Marcoux
Paolo Marinelli
James David Mason
Jerome McDonough
Robin McNeill
Roland Merrick
Jan Krzysztof Miziołek
Tomasz Müldner
David Orchard
Philippe Poulard
Liam Quin
Jonathan Robie
Laurel Shifrin
Norman Earl Smith
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Maik Stührenberg
B. Tommie Usdin
Fabio Vitali
William Wise
Ann Meirion Wrightson
Yu Wu
Zhiqiang Yu
Qi Zhang

Balisage 2008 Author/Speaker Biographies


Murray Altheim
Through 2005 Murray Altheim was a Ph.D. student reading in Knowledge Representation and Artificial Intelligence at the Knowledge Media Institute, until he realized the futility of it all and after some time in the Mediterranean decided he'd rather be near the sea in a much warmer place. Through January of 2002 he was employed in the XML Technology Center at Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park, California. Through February 1997 he was a Program Manager of Software Engineering at Spyglass, Inc. in Cambridge, MA. Through mid-January 1996, he was an Information Systems Analyst with the National Technology Transfer Center in Wheeling, West Virginia. Previously he was a Senior Systems Analyst contracted to NASA Headquarters' Office of Advanced Concepts and Technology, where he created and administered the NASA Commercial Technology Network web site. Prior to NASA he worked as a consultant and systems analyst at California State University in Sacramento, where he developed an executive information system for university planning and policy development. Prior to that he worked in the university's computer center for 357 years. Prior to that he was a mollusk.

He is author of various proposals on modularizing the HTML DTD, such as a draft proposal of a modular, XML version of HTML 4.0, as well as earlier documents such as the Structured HTML (SHML) DTD, available even today as a working draft, although one might prefer the W3C Recommendation Modularization of XHTML. He has functioned as Sun's representative to the W3C HTML Working Group, where he was co-author of a number of XHTML-related specifications and principal editor of the modular XHTML DTDs. During most of 2000-2001 he devoted a lot of time and energy to XML Topic Maps. He's also been enthusiastically involved in discussions regarding the Open Hyperdocument System (OHS), part of Doug Englebart's bootstrapping strategy, and in the past has been actively involved in the Standard Upper Ontology, Conceptual Graphs, and Common Logic mailing lists. All of this allows him to use a lot of big words with impunity.


John Arwe
A Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM Tivoli, John Arwe is currently co-chairing the SML working group in W3C, developing a language suited to the modeling of complex IT systems as sets of inter-related XML documents.

In his early career, he worked on IBM's mainframe clustering software, and then moved on to performance management through building autonomic system resource allocation into z/OS. Later, he worked on a distributed system project with similar goals, using the ARM 4 standard. Much of his career has been spent on issues that involve non-disruptive evolution of interfaces on these systems.


Syd Bauman
Syd Bauman is the technical person at the Brown University Women Writers Project, where he has worked since 1990, designing and maintaining a significantly extended TEI-conformant schema for encoding early printed books. He has served as the North American Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, has an AB from Brown University in political science, and has worked as an Emergency Medical Technician since 1983.


Jon Bosak
Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer Jon Bosak organized and led the working group that created XML, subsequently serving for two years as chair of the XML Coordination Group of the World Wide Web Consortium. He is a long-time member of OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, and he chaired the committee that developed the OASIS process for the definition of industry-specific XML markup standards. He has also served on the Advisory Board of the Electronic Business XML initiative (ebXML), a joint project of OASIS and the United Nations body for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT); on the Solution Provider Board of RosettaNet, the leading XML-based supply-chain organization for the electronics industry; and on the Board of Governors of the Electronics Industry Data Exchange Association (EIDX), a member section of CompTIA. He currently chairs the OASIS Universal Business Language Technical Committee. Articles by Jon Bosak can be found on his web page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bosak/


Peter F. Brown
Peter is founder and Managing Director of Pensive S.A. a European company that uses the Topic Maps standard to provide information management and collaboration solutions. He was Chair of the CEN eGovernment Focus Group throughout its mandate and until July 2006 was Senior Expert on eGovernment strategy in the Austrian Federal Chancellery where he promoted work on pan-European eGovernment services, electronic identity management and EU "Information Society" policies. He is currently an elected member of the Board of Directors of OASIS (The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards).

From 2000 to 2004, Peter led data standardisation and interoperability efforts in the European Parliament and introduced XML standards, business-centred information modelling, information architecture, and Topic Maps. He is the author of "Information Architecture with XML - a Management Strategy" (John Wiley and Sons, 2003), works regularly in many European languages, lectures extensively in Europe and North America and has worked as an expert for projects in Africa and Latin America.


Kurt Cagle
Kurt Cagle is an author and XML Developer with 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.


Maurizio Casimirri
Maurizio Casimirri is a graduate student in Computer Science, at the University of Bologna.


Marc de Graauw
Marc de Graauw likes to think about communication, language, semantics, identity. And then apply it to real world problems. He has studied philosophy, and worked in IT 20 years, the last 10 as an independent consultant. Current preoccupations are healthcare, versioning and REST-vs-SOA. He lives in work in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with his wife and three sons.


Patrick Durusau
Patrick Durusau has been trained as a lawyer, network administration, and biblical scholar, all of which probably contributed to his current involvement in standards work. (Whether that is reward or punishment is not certain.) Patrick is the Editor of OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 at OASIS, chairs the ODF Metadata subcommittee of the ODF TC at OASIS, is chair of INCITS V1, convener of the Topic Maps Working Group in ISO and is a co-editor of several parts of the topic maps standard. Patrick also teaches a course on topic maps at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Patrick, Carol (his wife), and Clarence, their Boston Terrier, are embarking on a chicken farming venture (very small, 12 chickens) with Barred Hollands. Their coloration was a major factor in choosing that particular breed.


Daniela Goecke
Daniela Goecke studied Computational Linguistics at Bielefeld University. She finished her master thesis in cooperation with IBM Scientific Center Heidelberg and worked four years at Philips Speech Processing Aachen. She now works as a research assistant at Bielefeld University together with Andreas Witt, Dieter Metzing, and Maik Stührenberg in the project A2 (Sekimo) of the Research Group 437 Text-technological modelling of information funded by the German Research Foundation. Her main research topics are the unification of text-technological resources and anaphora resolution.


Sandro Hawke
Sandro Hawke has been a member of the W3C Semantic Web Activity technical staff, at MIT, since 2000, and served as a software developer for what has become MIT's Decentralized Information Group. These days he enjoys programming in Prolog and Python. He is currently the staff contact for the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group and the OWL (Web Ontology Language) Working Group.


Ralph A. Hertlein
Ralph A. Hertlein guides IBM's cross industry standards efforts with a specific focus on open business level standards, leading special working groups with the ISSC, to resolve challenges within the industry standards arena. He initiated IBM's use of OAGIS as a basis for internal standardization leading several teams to develop the methods and techniques needed to leverage open standards for real value creation. He has also been elected to the Executive Board of OAGi, representing IBM and IBM's Open Industry Standards efforts there.


G. Ken Holman
G. Ken Holman is the Chief Technology Officer for Crane Softwrights Ltd., a co-editor of the UBL 2.0 specification, member of the W3C Working Group that developed XML from SGML, the founding chair of the two OASIS XML and XSLT Conformance Technical Committees and current chair of the Code List Representation Technical Committee and UBL HISC and SBS subcommittees and two task groups, a former international secretary of the ISO subcommittee responsible for the SGML family of standards, the current chair of the Canadian committee to the ISO, the author of electronically-published and print-published books on XML-related technologies, and a frequent conference speaker.


Claus Huitfeldt
Claus Huitfeldt (born 1957) is Associate Professor (førsteamanuensis) at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen since 1994.

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 was Research Director (2000-2002) of Aksis (Section for Culture, Language and Information Technology at the Bergen University Research Foundation). In 2003 he returned to his position at the Department of Philosophy, where he teaches modern philosophy and philosophy of language, and also gives frequent courses in text technology at the The Department of Humanistic Informatics.

He was active in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) since 1991, and was centrally involved in the foundation of the TEI Consortium in 2001. The consortium now counts more than 90 member institutions.

Huitfeldt's research interests are within philosophy of language, philosophy of technology, text theory, editorial philology and markup theory. He is currently leader of the project Markup Languages for Complex Documents (MLCD).


Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre
Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre is a Senior XML and XSLT Consultant for Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a firm specializing in helping their clients toward better publishing through XML and XSLT solutions. She teaches XML literacy; business implications of XML, and hands-on XML (and SGML) syntax, DTD and schema construction; XSLT, and XSL-FO courses. Debbie has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984, which was before SGML was officially adopted as an ISO standard. In a previous life, she write wrote code for systems that put ink on paper and used, taught, and documented a proprietary generic markup system named "SAMANTHA".


Jianhui Li
Jianhui Li is currently a software architect in XML processing in Intel® China Software Center. Since Jianhui joined Intel® in Sep. 2000, he has been working for multiple projects, including the IA-32® Execution Layer, an Itanium back-end for JIT compiler, and research and product developments in the XML processing area. Before joining Intel, he worked for a parallelizing compiler in Fudan University. His technical focus is static and dynamic compilation technology and XML processing acceleration technology.


Susan Malaika
Susan Malaika's specialties include XML, the Web, and databases. She has developed standards that support data for grid environments at the Global Grid Forum. In addition to working as an IBM product software developer on DB2 for UNIX/Windows and DB2 for zOS, she has also worked as an Internet specialist, a data analyst, and an application designer and developer. She has also co-authored a book on the Web and published articles on transaction processing and XML. She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.


Yves Marcoux
Yves Marcoux is a faculty member at EBSI, University of Montréal, since 1991. He is mainly involved in teaching and research activities in the fields of structured documents and digital information management. Prior to his appointment at EBSI, he has 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 University of Montréal in 1991. His main research interests are document theory, structured document implementation methodologies, and information retrieval in structured documents. Through GRDS, his research group at EBSI, he has been 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. He is currently a visiting researcher at the University of Bergen (Norway).


Paolo Marinelli
Paolo Marinelli holds a Master Degree in Computer Science from the University of Bologna. He is a temporary research associate at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna.


James David Mason
James D. Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, has been a writer, systems developer, and manufacturing engineer at U.S. Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge since the late 1970s. In 1981, he joined the ISO's work on standards for document management and interchange. He has chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, topic maps, and related standards, from 1985 until 2007. Dr. Mason has been a frequent writer and speaker on standards and their applications. For his work on SGML, Dr. Mason has received the Gutenberg Award from Printing Industries of America and the Tekkie Award from GCA. Dr. Mason was Chairman of the Knowledge Technologies 2002 conference sponsored by IDEAlliance. He is currently working on XML-based information systems to support the publishing, product engineering, and classification communities at DOE’s Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.


Jerome McDonough
Jerome McDonough is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he currently serves as coordinator for the Certificate of Advanced Study in Digital Libraries degree program. He formerly worked as the team leader for New York University's digital library development program. He is a member of the METS editorial board as well as the ODRL international advisory board, and has served on the NISO Standards Development Committee as well as the PREMIS preservation metadata working group. His current research focuses on the application of metadata in digital libraries and data curation efforts, as well as digital preservation.


Robin McNeill
Robin McNeill graduated in May of 2008 with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree at Acadia University. He will be returning to Acadia University for the following academic year as a graduate student pursuing his masters degree in computer science.


Roland Merrick
Roland Merrick is a member of IBM's Emerging Software Standards team focused on emerging standards identification and subsequent standards development. His work focuses on solving the challenges of interoperability though the combination and simplification of application and middleware standards in various industries. Currently, he represents IBM in the Enterprise Interoperability Centre (EIC) where collaboration between software vendors and users of that software is taking place to define profiles to address various B2B use cases. He is also chair of the W3C XHTML Working Group and has also represented IBM on the W3C Working Group defining XForms, a replacement for HTML Forms.


Jan Krzysztof Miziołek
Jan Krzysztof Miziołek works for the University of Warsaw, Poland. Dr. Miziołek received his Ph.D. in mathematics from 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.


David Orchard
David Orchard is senior technical director in BEA Systems' CTO Office, focusing on web and web services standards. He has been elected to a 3rd term on the W3C Technical Architecture Group and is active in numerous standards activities. He is currently or has been a co-editor of various specifications such as SOAP 1.2, WSDL 2.0, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Eventing, WS-MetadataExchange, XML Schema, Web Services Architecture, XML Link, XInclude, and SOAP-Conversation.


Philippe Poulard
Philippe Poulard is a software engineer at INRIA (french national institute for research in computer science and control) where he is involved in Web-oriented problematics. He has been specialized in XML technologies and e-documentation for 10 years. During this period, he has developed XML and SGML-based solutions and prototypes on behalf of the French Army and INRIA. More recently he has designed and implemented a set of XML technologies named "Active Tags" (http://ns.inria.org/active-tags/). He also teaches XML and Java at Nice/Sophia-Antipolis university and Aix/Marseille university. He has an engineer degree (M.Sc) from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers.


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.


Jonathan Robie
Jonathan Robie designed and implemented the Apache Qpid XML Exchange. He is a member of the Emerging Technologies team at Red Hat. Jonathan is one of the inventors of XQuery, and is an editor of XQuery 1.1 and several other XQuery specifications. He received an Infoworld Innovator 2005 award for his work on XQuery.

Before joining Red Hat, Jonathan was the Program Manager for DataDirect XQuery, and he has also worked on the architectural team for three XML databases: Software AG's Tamino, Texcel, and POET's CMS. He has also been an editor for specifications on the W3C XML Schema and Document Object Model Working Groups.


Laurel Shifrin
Laurel Shifrin is the Manager of Data Architecture at LexisNexis, an international company offering online information and solutions. She has been working with markup languages since 1993 and presented at Markup Technologies, a predecessor to Balisage. She is also the co-author (with Michael Atkinson) of Flickipedia: Perfect Films for Every Occasion, Holiday, Mood, Ordeal and Whim (Chicago Review Press).


Norman Earl Smith
Mr. Smith has been a software developer for 30+ years and involved with markup applications starting with SGML in 1990. He has worked for SAIC for 26 years on a variety of projects ranging from automated document creation to robotics to web applications. He has authored 12 books including two on SGML/XML. Mr. Smith was selected as an SAIC Technical Fellow in 2004.


C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is a member of the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium. 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.


Maik Stührenberg
Maik Stührenberg studied Computational Linguistics at Bielefeld University. He worked four years as research assistant at Giessen University in different text-technological projects (both funded by the German government and the German Research Foundation). He now works as a research assistant at Bielefeld University together with Andreas Witt, Dieter Metzing and Daniela Goecke in the project A2 (Sekimo) 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 Tommie at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html


Fabio Vitali
Fabio Vitali is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bologna. He holds a Laurea degree in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer and Law, both from the University of Bologna. His research interests include markup languages; distributed, coordinated systems; and the World Wide Web. He is the author of several papers on hypertext functionalities, the World Wide Web, and XML.


William Wise
William (Bill) Wise is the B2B Standards Lead within Client Process Transformation. He guides the use of the standard XML messages for use with IBM's trading partners. He also represents IBM's requirements for sales distribution related messages within several XML standards groups.


Ann Meirion Wrightson
Initially trained in Philosophy (specializing in logic); following a varied and successful early career in electronic publishing, Ann Wrightson spent ten years lecturing, researching, and consulting in an academic context, developing interests in formal methods, requirements modelling and system safety alongside continuing involvement in information systems theory and practice. Moving on from academia in 2000, for the last few years Ann has worked as an advisor, technical strategist and enterprise IT architect, mainly in eGovernment and Healthcare. Her main area of expertise is interoperability over space and time, especially in the context of establishing and managing large scale long-lived content repositories for purposes including new media publishing, digital archiving and electronic health records. Ann is a member of the Board of the HL7 (Health Level Seven) UK affiliate, and has been working closely with the interoperability standards for the English health care records "Spine" since mid-2006.


Yu Wu
Yu Wu works for XML Engineering team of Intel China Software Center, Software Solution Group. He focuses on parallel XML processing development. His main interests include parallel modeling and programming, advanced XML processing technology, etc.


Zhiqiang Yu
Zhiqiang Yu is currently working in XML engineering team of Intel® Software Solutions Group. His work includes XML parser, Schema validator, performance optimization, etc. His technical interests include virtual machine, XML processing acceleration technology, etc. His email is zhiqiang.yu@intel.com.


Qi Zhang
Qi Zhang currently works for XML Engineering team of Intel China Software Center, Software Solution Group. He involves in developing advanced features for Intel XML products. Before that, Qi also worked for optimizing JVM on top of Itanium platforms and development of Intel IA32 Execution Layer. His technical interest is dynamic compilation and optimizations under virtual machine environment.


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