Owen Ambur
Owen Ambur is actively retired following 34 years of Federal public service. He co-founded and, for six years prior to retiring, he co-chaired the governmentwide XML community of practice chartered by the CIO Council. Subsequently, he proposed the specification of an XML-based standard for the content of strategic plans and performance reports. Under the auspices of AIIM, he co-chaired the committee that obtained approval of StratML Part 1, the StratML core, as a ISO standard and Part 2, Performance Plans and Reports, as an American national standard.

Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck is the Program Head for Literature at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. He has been involved in the PubMed Central project since it began in 2000. He has been working in print and then electronic journal publishing since the early 1990s. Currently he is co-chair of the NISO Z39.96 JATS Standing Committee and is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences.

Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar
Elisa Beshero-Bondar explores and teaches document data modeling with the XML family of languages. She serves on the TEI Technical Council and is the founder and organizer of the Digital Mitford project and its usually annual coding school. She experiments with visualizing data from complex document structures like epic poems and with computer-assisted collation of differently encoded editions of Frankenstein. Her ongoing adventures with markup technologies are documented on her development site at newtfire.org.

George Bina
George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops Oxygen XML suite of XML editing, authoring, development, publishing, and collaboration tools. He has more than 20 years of experience in working with XML and related technologies, bringing many innovative ideas to reality and contributing to XML-related open-source projects.

Geert Bormans
Geert Bormans has long been an angle-bracket jack-of-all-trades. He loves the beauty of a well-architected solution or a pure and simplified process. Geert makes a living as an independent consultant, through his company C-Moria BV, providing XML or Linked Open Data solutions, mainly to the publishing industry. He does so with a broad geographical flexibility.

Geert likes an interesting challenge, easily found when having two teenage daughters. However, he prefers the challenges to involve alpine ground, six strings, or markup.

Ravit H. David
Ravit H. David (she/her) serves as the Distinctive Collections Librarian at Scholars Portal, Univ. of Toronto Libraries. In her current position, Ravit focuses on developing Gov. Info content, Accessible service (ACE), OA and Archive-It collections. Ravit is keen on all aspects of digital access, from policy and copyright to metadata best practices for discoverability.

Steven J. DeRose
Steve DeRose is a computational linguist who works mainly in document structured document systems, NLP, and hypertext. He holds degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Brown University.

He co-founded Electronic Book Technologies in 1989 to build the first SGML browser and retrieval system, “DynaText“, and has been deeply involved in document standards including XML, TEI, XPath, XPointer, EAD, Open eBook, OSIS, HyTime, and others. He has served as adjunct faculty in Computer Science at Brown University and Calvin University, and written many papers and patents, and two books. He is presently Head of Linguistics at Docugami, a Seattle-based startup solving business document problems using AI.

Patrick Durusau
Patrick Durusau is the Chair of the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC (https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office) and has been a member of that TC since its initial meeting on December 16, 2002. His employer/sponsor has changed several times over the years, and Patrick has been a co-editor/editor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) for the majority of that time. Patrick is also the project editor for the ISO/IEC mirror of ODF as ISO/IEC 26300.

Patrick blogs about topic maps (being one of the co-editors of ISO 13250-5), other semantic issues and of late, how irregular forces can leverage data for their causes at Another Word for It (http://tm.durusau.net/).

John Francis
After a brief career as an Archaeologist, John Francis has had a long career in Computing working on many bleeding edge technologies from distributed multi-media office systems to the first portable GUI frameworks and one of the first UK internet shops. At DeltaXML, John is the lead R&D developer responsible for many of our new comparison algorithms. John’s ambition is to return to digging sometime when he can afford it.

Damian Gibbs
Damian Gibbs is a Solutions Consultant at Typefi where he works with organisations to automate publishing processes. He works across a number of diverse organsisations with varying types of XML and non-XML content to design and build publishing automation workflows. He started out as an apprentice typesetter over 20 years ago with a leading South African educational publisher and from the start always sought out digital technologies to support publishing.

Michael R. Gryk
Dr. Michael R. Gryk is Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Biophysics at UCONN Health. At UCONN, Michael co-leads a technical research and discovery component of the NMRbox BTRR Center, the mission of which is to foster the computational reproducibility and scientific data re-use of bioNMR data. Michael is also the associate director of the BioMagResBank, the international repository for bioNMR research data. He is also a doctoral student at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where his broad research interests are in provenance, workflows, digital curation and preservation, reproducibility, and scientific data re-use. Michael is also a participant of the W3C Invisible Markup group.

Tomos Hillman
Tom Hillman has worked as an XML practitioner and consultant for fifteen years, doing everything from documentation to IT support and administration to workflows for digital publishing to conference organization to XML database management and consultancy.

Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes is a programmer in the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre. He served on the TEI Technical Council from 2010 to 2015 and was managing editor of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative from 2013 to 2015. He is lead programmer on several large DH projects, including The Map of Early Modern London and Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry.

Mary Holstege
Mary Holstege spent decades developing software in Silicon Valley, in and around markup technologies and information extraction. She has most recently been pursuing artistic endeavours. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science, for a thesis on document representation.

Joel Kalvesmaki
Founder and director of the Text Alignment Network (TAN), Joel Kalvesmaki is an XML developer for the Government Publishing Office and a scholar in early Christian studies. Those two worlds intersect in TAN and the Guide to Evagrius Ponticus, an authoritative online reference work on the fourth-century monk-theologian.

Jean Kaplansky
Jean Kaplansky is a proven and experienced Publishing Content Platform Solutions Architect with a background in working in the small, medium, and enterprise business environments across multiple industries, including Software, Hardware, Aerospace, Insurance, Scholarly Publishing, and the instructional design and publishing of education content. Jean has accomplished extensive DocBook stylesheet design and content analysis throughout her career.

Jean enjoys a challenge in addition to solving problems and explaining technical things to non-technical people. Jean has contributed to publishing taxonomies, schemas, authoring tools, Content Management, and Automated Publishing systems development. Jean also contributes to designing new business workflows and processes based on information architecture, knowledge management science, and best practices.

Michael Kay
Michael Kay is the lead developer of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor, and was the editor of the XSLT 2.0 and 3.0 specifications. His company, Saxonica, was founded in 2004 and continues the development of products implementing the specifications in the XML family. He is based in Reading, UK.

Eliot Kimber
Eliot Kimber is an XML practitioner currently working for ServiceNow. He has been involved with SGML and XML for more than 30 years. Eliot has contributed to a number of standards, including SGML, HyTime, XML, XSLT, DSSSL, and DITA. While Eliot’s focus has been managing large scale hyperdocuments for authoring and delivery, most of his day-to-day work involves producing online and paged (or pageable) media from XML documents. Eliot maintains a number of open-source projects including DITA for Publishers, The Wordinator, and the DITA Community collection of DITA-related tools and other aids. Eliot is author of DITA for Practitioners, Vol 1: Architecture and Technology, from XML Press. When not trying to retire the technical debt in his various open-source projects, Eliot lives with his family in Austin, Texas, where he practices Aikido and bakes bread.

Robin La Fontaine
Robin La Fontaine is the founder and CEO of DeltaXML. His background includes computer aided design software, and he has been addressing the challenges and opportunities associated with information change for many years. DeltaXML tools are now providing critical comparison and merge support for corporate and commercial publishing systems around the world, and are integrated into content management, financial, and network management applications supplied by major players. Robin studied Engineering Science at Worcester College, Oxford, and Computer Science at the University of Hertford. He is a Chartered Engineer and member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. He has three adult children, four grandchildren, and never finds quite enough time for walking, gardening and woodworking.

Deborah A. Lapeyre
Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre is a Senior Consultant for Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in helping their clients toward better publishing through XML, XSLT, and Schematron solutions. She works with Tommie Usdin as architects and Secretariat for JATS (ANSI NISO Z39.96-2019 Journal Article Tag Suite) and BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite). She teaches hands-on XML, XSLT, DTD and schema construction, and Schematron courses as well as numerous technical and business-level introductions to XML and JATS. Debbie has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984 (before SGML was finalized as an ISO standard). In a previous life, she wrote code for systems that put ink on paper and used, taught, and documented a proprietary generic markup system named “SAMANTHA”. Hobbies, besides Balisage, include pumpkin carving parties.

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 in early retirement. Rarely happier than when writing XSLT to write XSLT to write XSLT, he spent the next several years helping develop the Saxon XSLT processor for Saxonica, including developing the XSLT-based XSLT compiler now used in Saxon-JS. Now in proper retirement for a couple of years, he still likes to “potter” with XSLT and is currently working on a Javascript-based processor for InvisibleXML to attach to Saxon-JS.

James David Mason
James David Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, became 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 chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, and related standards, for more than 20 years. 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. He recently retired from working on information systems to support manufacturing and documentation at DOE’s Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

David Maus
David Maus is Head of Research & Development at the State and University Library Hamburg. He is the lead developer and maintainer of SchXslt, an XSLT-based Schematron processor.

Mike Miller
For over 40 years, Michael Miller (Vice President, Antenna House) has been involved in typesetting, document formatting, and document management, and has an extensive background with structured data, including SGML, XML, S1000D, and DITA. Mike has been part of the evolution from hot metal to phototypesetting, laser printing, and web. He has worked extensively in Europe and North America and has been involved in implementing hundreds of systems for automated document formatting.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is an independent markup geek based in Göteborg, Sweden. He has provided angled brackets to many organisations and companies across a number of borders over the years, some of which deliver the rule of law, help dairy farmers make a living, and assist in servicing commercial aircraft. And others are just for fun.

Ari is the proud owner and head projectionist of Western Sweden’s last functioning 35/70mm cinema, situated in his garage, which should explain why he once wrote a paper on automating commercial cinemas using XML.

Jean Paoli
Jean Paoli is the Founder of Docugami Inc., a startup that uses AI to transform the unique document business processes of individual companies, making frontline users more efficient while giving COOs better compliance and insights — inspired by his deep belief that openness and interoperability raises all boats. He was formerly President of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Throughout his career, Jean has worked in startups: before Microsoft, with Inria, the renowned French research Labs (Gipsi S.A. and Grif S.A.); and within Microsoft creating four new startups: XML, InfoPath, opening the Office formats and MS OpenTech (Microsoft’s open source subsidiary). The startups he built created breakthrough platform technologies used today by millions. He is the recipient of multiple industry awards for his work on XML, semi-structured data, the convergence of documents and data and openness at large. In addition to core technical design, Jean takes deep care at building healthy ecosystems at worldwide scale. He is credited as one of the key leaders responsible for shifting in a fundamental way, under the guidance of the CEO, Microsoft’s strategy to embrace and love open source.

Steven Pemberton
Steven Pemberton is a researcher affiliated with CWI, Amsterdam. His research is in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can support users.

He co-designed the ABC programming language that formed the basis for Python and was one of the first handful of people on the open internet in Europe, when the CWI set it up in 1988. Involved with the Web from the beginning, he organised two workshops at the first Web Conference in 1994. For the best part of a decade he chaired the W3C HTML working group, and has co-authored many web standards, including HTML, XHTML, CSS, XForms, and RDFa. He now chairs the W3C XForms and Invisible Markup groups. In 2022 he was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award. More details at http://www.cwi.nl/~steven.

Wendell Piez
Wendell Piez has been a markup advocate, systems developer, and Balisage presenter since early days.

Allen H. Renear
Allen Renear is a faculty member in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He served as dean of the School from 2012 to 2019 and is currently in the Office of the Provost as a Special Advisor for Strategic Initiatives. Prior to coming to Illinois, he was Director of the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. Renear was an “Observer” at X3V1.TG8 during the finalization of ISO8879 and has never recovered. He has served on several early TEI committees, was the American Philosophical Association’s delegate on the first TEI Advisory Board, was involved in various roles in the Brown University (now Northeastern University) Womens Writers Project, and was the first Chair of the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group (OEBPS, now ePUB/IDPF). He has been coming to Balisage (and its predecessors) for longer than he can remember. His academic specialties are data curation, scientific communication, and the conceptual foundations of information systems.

Jonathan Robie
In the XML world, Jonathan Robie is best known as one of the inventors of XQuery and an editor of W3C XQuery specifications from the the first Working Drafts through XQuery 3.1. In the Bible translation community, Jonathan works with Clear Bible on linguistic datasets related to biblical Greek and Hebrew. Previously, he worked for SIL International as Program Manager for the Paratext ecosystem, used by over 9,000 Bible translators in over 300 translation organizations worldwide. He is also co-chair of the Copenhagen Alliance for Open Biblical Resources and chair for Distributed Text Services, an API for TEI document repositories.

In a long and varied career, Jonathan has served as Chair of the API Governance Board at EMC’s Enterprise Content Division, a member of the AMQP enterprise messaging team at Red Hat, and the architect of XML database systems at Software AG, Progress Software, Texcel Incorporated, and POET Software.

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. He co-edited the XML 1.0 specification, the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, and the XML Schema Definition Language (XSDL) 1.1 specification.

Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is a Digital Humanities Developer at Simon Fraser University’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab. He holds an MA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia. He currently serves as Technical Editor for the Winnifred Eaton Archive and is a member of TEI By Example’s International Advisory Committee.

Bethan Tovey-Walsh
Bethan Tovey-Walsh is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics and Welsh at Swansea University, doing research on code-switching and lexical borrowing in Welsh-English bilinguals and working on the CorCenCC modern Welsh corpus project.

Norman Tovey-Walsh
Norm Tovey-Walsh is currently a senior software developer at Saxonica Ltd, working out of his home in Swansea Wales. Previously, he was employed by MarkLogic Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Arbortext, and O’Reilly Media (then O’Reilly & Associates).

Gayanthika Udeshani
Gayanthika Udeshani is an Associate Architect at Typefi, where she leads the XSLT team and provide supports for other software solutions as well.

She holds a MSC in Software Architect from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. She has over 11 years of experience as a developer and she has started working at Typefi since 2018.

B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML for textual documents. 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 and a member of the BITS Working Group and the NISO STS Standing Committee. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html.

Zubin Rustom Wadia
Zubin Rustom Wadia is a product manager at Docugami Inc., a startup that uses AI to transform the unique document business processes of individual companies, making frontline users more efficient while giving COOs better compliance and insights. Zubin has worked with numerous Fortune 500 and Government organizations to unlock the full value of their content repositories. He is a former member of the Java Content Repository 2.0 expert group, and co-author on three books about software programming and architecture. In 2009, he founded a critically acclaimed startup that raised the standard for public safety alerting in the United States: CiviGuard. He holds an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Robert Wheeler
Robert Wheeler is the Director of Publishing Technologies at ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), where he helps guide their digital strategy and publishing business, with a particular focus on the Codes and Standards publishing program. He is Co-Chair of the NISO SSOS (Standards-Specific Ontology Standards) Working Group and the NISO STS ([XML] Standard Tag Suite) Standing Committee.

Robert has over 25 years’ experience in STM/STEM publishing, from the front end of production to online publishing, working previously at AIP (American Institute of Physics) on their online publishing platform, Scitation, and before that, supporting their in-house XML typesetting division. He also worked at Springer/Kluwer Academic, part of a small team devoted to the planning, design, and implementation of electronic initiatives, spearheading a number of projects focused on XML technology and digital workflows.