Faculty 2011

Our lec­tur­ers are hand picked for their in-depth expert­ise and abil­ity to con­vey their exper­i­ences to max­im­ise the learn­ing exper­i­ence of our del­eg­ates. They also are friendly, approach­able and able to have a good laugh! The intens­ive, yet informal, atmo­sphere at the XML Sum­mer School gives del­eg­ates the oppor­tun­ity to pick the brains of our expert fac­ulty, both dur­ing the classes and after­wards over din­ner or in the bar. Fac­ulty Board mem­bers also teach.

Adam Ret­ter

Adam Ret­ter is co-director of eXist Solu­tions GmbH, which provides sup­port and con­sultancy for the open source eXist Nat­ive XML Data­baseand web plat­form. With over a dec­ades exper­i­ence in build­ing online web applic­a­tions, hav­ing star­ted with Perl, CGI, and C++ ISAPI mov­ing up through to .NET, PHP and J2EE, today he is much hap­pier doing the same using XQuery, XSLT and XForms.Adam is an invited expert on the W3C XQuery Work­ing Group, where he focuses on rep­res­ent­ing the Open Source com­munit­ies interests and advan­cing XQuery for com­plete web applic­a­tion devel­op­ment. Adam is a strong pro­ponent of XML Applic­a­tion Server archi­tec­tures, where entire applic­a­tions are built in XML tech­no­lo­gies and power enter­prise scale end-to-end XML and XRX Applic­a­tions. To fur­ther stand­ard­ise XML applic­a­tion devel­op­ment, Adam foun­ded the EXQuery pro­ject in early 2009 and has since been work­ing with the com­munity and as part of the EXPath pro­ject to stand­ard­ise and improve XML applic­a­tion devel­op­ment with XQuery, XSLT and XPath. Adam’s homepage is at http://www.adamretter.org.uk.

Dr. Andy Seaborne

Andy has been work­ing on the stor­age and query of RDF data, first as a researcher at HPLabs, and now at Epi­morph­ics.Andy is con­tinu­ing his par­ti­cip­a­tion in the SPARQL stand­ard­iz­a­tion pro­cess. He star­ted as a mem­ber of the W3C RDF Data Access Work­ing Group and is a mem­ber of the cur­rent W3C SPARQL Work­ing Group. Andy co-edits the query lan­guage spe­cific­a­tion and lead the pro­posal sub­mis­sion for SPARQL Update and is a mem­ber of the W3C RDF Work­ing Group.He also works on Apache Jena, an open source RDF frame­work for Java, where he con­trib­uted the query engine, ensur­ing that com­plete imple­ment­a­tions of the stand­ards are avail­able, and sev­eral per­sist­ent stor­age sub-systems.Andy has a PhD in Com­puter Sci­ence from the Com­puter Labor­at­ory at the Uni­ver­sity of Cambridge.Andy is teach­ing in the Semantic Tech­no­lo­gies course.

Pro­fessor David Shotton

David is at the Depart­ment of Zoology, Uni­ver­sity of Oxford and writes:A cell bio­lo­gist by back­ground, I cur­rently develop ser­vices for the man­age­ment, shar­ing, integ­ra­tion and reuse of bio­lo­gical research data, e.g. Open­Fly­Data, ADMIRAL and Data­Flow. I also work in Semantic Pub­lish­ing, devel­op­ing the SPAR (Semantic Pub­lish­ing and Ref­er­en­cing) Onto­lo­gies for describ­ing bib­li­o­graphic entit­ies and cita­tions. In par­tic­u­lar, I wish to improved report­ing of infec­tious dis­ease invest­ig­a­tions, for which we have developed MIIDI, a Min­imal Inform­a­tion stand­ard for report­ing an Infec­tious Dis­ease Invest­ig­a­tion, and MIIDI Forms, a web tool that facil­it­ates the entry of such metadata using web ser­vices to import data and onto­logy terms. I now wish to cre­ate Open Research Reports based on MIIDI, namely open access struc­tured digital abstracts in both human– and machine-readable form that describe dis­ease data­sets or journal art­icles. Other interests include using these tech­niques to assist data integ­ra­tion in the human­it­ies, as exem­pli­fied by the CLAROS pro­ject.David’s homepage is at http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/staff/ academics/shotton_dm.htm.

Debbie Lapeyre

Ms. Lapeyre has been work­ing with XML, XSLT, and XPath since their incep­tion and with SGML (XML’s pre­de­cessor) since 1984. Debbie is an archi­tect and developer of XML Tag Sets (vocab­u­lar­ies) who designs and writes the schemas (DTD, XSD, RELAX NG) that model those vocab­u­lar­ies. Most recently, she serves as the archi­tect and as a mem­ber of the design team for the NLM Journal Archiv­ing and Inter­change Tag Suite, now the de facto stand­ard for tag­ging journal art­icles worldwide.As a document-oriented pub­lish­ing ana­lyst, Debbie helps cli­ents to ana­lyze their inform­a­tion man­age­ment, retrieval, and distribution/publication require­ments and trans­lates these require­ments into func­tion­ing pro­duc­tion sys­tems, based on XML tech­no­lo­gies. As a senior XSLT and XSL-FO con­sult­ant for Mul­berry Tech­no­lo­gies, Inc., she designs both pages and spe­cific­a­tions for com­plex XSLT trans­forms and stylesheets as well as devel­ops pro­to­type XSLT applications.Debbie is a mem­ber of the XML Guild. She is also a co-chair of “Bal­is­age: The Markup Con­fer­ence” and has pre­vi­ously co-chaired “Extreme Markup Lan­guages”, “Markup Tech­no­lo­gies”, and the annual inter­na­tional “SGML/XML’XX Con­fer­ence”. She teaches XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, Schemat­ron, What-is-XML-and-Why-Should-You-Care, and XML print work­flows at ven­ues all over the English-speaking world.

Gary Cor­nelius

Gary Cor­nelius is an exper­i­enced XML con­sult­ant and inform­a­tion archi­tect, work­ing for Eleven Inform­a­tions, LLP. Gary has been an act­ive con­trib­utor to XML mail­ing lists and stand­ards for over a dec­ade and enjoys tech­nical pro­ject man­age­ment involving XML. He has developed sev­eral XML and web related train­ing courses for IT engin­eers and man­agers. Inter­ested in data visu­al­isa­tion and usab­il­ity, he has invest­ig­ated many tools and tech­niques for visu­al­iz­a­tion of com­plex XML data. Gary has both broad know­ledge and hands-on exper­i­ence of XML hav­ing worked across many mar­ket sec­tors on XML inform­a­tion archi­tec­tures. He stud­ied pub­lish­ing, graphic com­mu­nic­a­tion man­age­ment, and digital imaging.

Dr. Henry Thompson

Henry S. Thompson divides his time between the School of Inform­at­ics at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh, where he is Pro­fessor of Web Inform­at­ics, based in the Insti­tute for Lan­guage, Cog­ni­tion and Com­pu­ta­tion, and inde­pend­ent con­sult­ing on XML-related busi­ness strategy.He received his Ph.D. in Lin­guist­ics from the Uni­ver­sity of Cali­for­nia at Berke­ley in 1980. His uni­ver­sity edu­ca­tion was divided between Lin­guist­ics and Com­puter Sci­ence, in which he holds an M.Sc. While still at Berke­ley he was affil­i­ated with the Nat­ural Lan­guage Research Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Cen­ter, where he par­ti­cip­ated in the GUS and KRL pro­jects. His research interests have ranged widely, includ­ing nat­ural lan­guage pars­ing, speech recog­ni­tion, machine trans­la­tion eval­u­ation, mod­el­ling human lex­ical access mech­an­isms, the fine struc­ture of human-human dia­logue, lan­guage resource cre­ation and archi­tec­tures for lin­guistic annota­tion. His cur­rent research is focussed on the semantics of markup, XML pipelines and more gen­er­ally under­stand­ing and artic­u­lat­ing the archi­tec­tures of the Web.He was a mem­ber of the SGML Work­ing Group of the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium which designed XML, a major con­trib­utor to the core con­cepts of XSLT and W3C XML Schema and is cur­rently a mem­ber of the XML Core, XML Schema and XML Pro­cessing Model Work­ing Groups of the W3C. He has been elec­ted three times to the W3C TAG (Tech­nical Archi­tec­ture Group). He was lead editor of the Struc­tures part of the XML Schema W3C Recom­mend­a­tion, for which he co-wrote the first pub­licly avail­able imple­ment­a­tion, XSV. From 2002 through 2010 he was a mem­ber of the tech­nical staff of the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium (W3C), where he worked in the XML Activ­ity. He has presen­ted many papers and tutori­als on SGML, DSSSL, XML, XSLT, XML Schema, XML Pipelines and Web Archi­tec­ture in both indus­trial and pub­lic set­tings over the last thir­teen years.Homepage: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/

Dr. Jeni Tennison

Dr. Jeni Ten­nison is an inde­pend­ent con­sult­ant. She spe­cial­ises in XSLT and XML schema devel­op­ment with for­ays into AJAX and RDF. She trained as a know­ledge engin­eer, gain­ing a PhD in col­lab­or­at­ive onto­logy devel­op­ment, and since becom­ing a con­sult­ant has worked in a wide vari­ety of areas, includ­ing journal pub­lish­ing, medi­eval manu­scripts, legis­la­tion and fin­an­cial ser­vices. She is author of sev­eral books includ­ing “Begin­ning XSLT 2.0” (Apress, 2005).Jeni was an invited expert on the W3C’s XSL Work­ing Group dur­ing the devel­op­ment of XSLT 2.0 and was one of the founders of the EXSLT ini­ti­at­ive to stand­ard­ise exten­sions to XSLT and XPath.

Jo Rabin

Jo’s a con­sult­ant CTO provid­ing tech­no­logy strategy and devel­op­ment man­age­ment with a focus on mobile and pub­lish­ing. His exper­i­ence includes being CTO at dot­Mobi, Flir­to­matic and at Reu­ters Mobile.While at Reu­ters, Jo developed the first ver­sion of the news industry inter­change stand­ard, NewsML. Between 2005 and Jan 2011 he co-chaired the W3C Mobile Web Best Prac­tices Work­ing Group, and was editor or co-editor of lots of mobile-related W3C Notes and Recom­mend­a­tions includ­ing Mobile Web Best Prac­tices, Device Descrip­tion Repos­it­ory Simple API, mobileOK Basic Tests and Guidelines for Web Con­tent Trans­form­a­tion Proxies.Jo’s a co-founder and co-organiser of MobileM­onday Lon­don which holds monthly mobile related events and hosts a lively dis­cus­sion list on all mat­ters mobile.

Joe Goll­ner

Joe Goll­ner (www.gollner.ca) is the Dir­ector of Gnostyx Research where he works with organ­iz­a­tions to make the most of open stand­ards and intel­li­gent con­tent tech­no­lo­gies. Pre­vi­ously, Joe served as Vice Pres­id­ent and Chief Solu­tion Archi­tect for Stilo Inter­na­tional where he led a world-class team in deliv­ery of highly scal­able con­tent solu­tions that lever­aged the latest innov­a­tions in the Omn­i­M­ark pro­gram­ming lan­guage. Prior to that, he was the founder and pres­id­ent of XIA Sys­tems Cor­por­a­tion, an XML solu­tion integ­rator that he foun­ded in 1998 and that he sold to Stilo Inter­na­tional in 2004. While he has worked in a wide vari­ety of indus­tries, he has been con­tinu­ously engaged in the design, devel­op­ment and deploy­ment of large-scale solu­tions in the aerospace and defence sec­tors for over twenty years. A former Artil­lery Officer in the Cana­dian mil­it­ary, Joe was edu­cated in a wide vari­ety of sub­jects at Queens Uni­ver­sity (Bach­el­ors of Arts, Math­em­at­ics and Lit­er­at­ure) and the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford (Mas­ters of Philo­sophy), and he has also com­pleted gradu­ate pro­grams in pro­ject man­age­ment, busi­ness ana­lysis and know­ledge management.

Leigh Dodds

Leigh Dodds is a semantic web geek who is pas­sion­ate about the web, open stand­ards and open data. Leigh has a strong tech­nical back­ground in devel­op­ing with Java, XML, and semantic web tech­no­lo­gies; has writ­ten numer­ous art­icles on related top­ics for IBM developer­Works and XML.com, and has presen­ted at a num­ber of tech­nical con­fer­ences. Leigh was pre­vi­ously CTO at Ingenta and now works for Talis as a Pro­gramme Man­ager for the Talis Platform.

Matt Pat­ter­son

Matt Pat­ter­son has over 10 years exper­i­ence build­ing for the web, from web design and front-end devel­op­ment all the way through to back-end devel­op­ment. Along the way he’s co-written a book on CSS, which is cur­rently in its second edi­tion and has been trans­lated into Italian and Span­ish, led a soft­ware team at the BBC, and spent five of the last ten years run­ning design– and development-focussed con­sultan­cies. He was also a co-organiser of the NoSQL Europeconference.He has a per­sonal blog over at Repro­cessed.

Dr. Michael Kay

Dr. Michael Kay is the founder and tech­nical dir­ector of Saxon­ica Lim­ited, which devel­ops both the open source and com­mer­cial vari­ants of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery pro­cessor, as well as offer­ing XML-related con­sultancy services.Michael is an invited expert on the W3C work­ing groups devel­op­ing XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema. In par­tic­u­lar he is the tech­nical lead on the XSL Work­ing Group, which is cur­rently devel­op­ing a new ver­sion of the lan­guage to handle stream­ing trans­form­a­tions of large doc­u­ments. He is also the author of the defin­it­ive ref­er­ence book on XSLT 2.0, and has writ­ten numer­ous art­icles and con­fer­ence papers on XSLT, XQuery, and related tech­no­lo­gies. He is a mem­ber of the XML Guild, a group of lead­ing inde­pend­ent XML con­sult­ants, and joint win­ner of the XML Cup in 2005, awar­ded for con­tri­bu­tions to the XML community.Dr. Kay spent nearly 25 years with the Brit­ish com­puter man­u­fac­turer ICL (later Fujitsu) where he designed and imple­men­ted a wide range of data man­age­ment soft­ware products; appoin­ted an ICL Fel­low, he was also respons­ible for advising the company’s senior man­age­ment and cus­tom­ers on tech­no­logy strategy. He gained his Ph.D. at the Uni­ver­sity of Cam­bridge for research on data­base man­age­ment sys­tems, study­ing under Maurice Wilkes.Michael lives in Read­ing, Eng­land, 25 miles down the road from Oxford.Michael is teach­ing in the XSLT and XQuery course.

Nor­man (Norm) Walsh

Nor­man Walsh is a Lead Engin­eer at Mark­Lo­gic Cor­por­a­tion where he works with the Applic­a­tion Ser­vices team. 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.With almost twenty years of industry exper­i­ence, Norm is well known for his work on Doc­Book and a wide range of open source pro­jects. He is the author of Doc­Book: The Defin­it­ive Guide.

Paul Downey

Paul Downey is an inde­pend­ent developer focus­sing on The Web. Until recently he was a mem­ber of Osmosoft, a small Open Source Innov­a­tion team at BT, where he con­trib­uted to a num­ber of Open Source pro­jects, not­ably Tiddly­Wiki. Formerly a par­ti­cipant in the stand­ard­isa­tion of XML and Web ser­vices at the W3C, WS-I and OASIS, Paul spends his time evan­gel­ising the value of REST and the Web through code, present­a­tions and uber-doodles such as the mildly notori­ous The Web is Agree­ment.

Sebastian Rahtz

Sebastian Rahtz is head of the Inform­a­tion and Sup­port Group at Oxford Uni­ver­sity Com­put­ing Ser­vices, where he over­sees the teams respons­ible for web, mobile apps, help desk, IT staff liaison, and devel­op­ment pro­jects. He has been closely asso­ci­ated with the Text Encod­ing Ini­ti­at­ive for the last dec­ade as a mem­ber of its Tech­nical Coun­cil, archi­tect of its revised metas­chema sys­tem, and author of a lib­rary of XSL trans­forms for TEI doc­u­ments (includ­ing the Guidelines doc­u­ment­a­tion and its schemas). Since 2008 he has been part of the team devel­op­ing CLAROS (“the world of ancient art on the semantic web”) at Oxford, for which he leads the Meta­morph­oses sub-project which to man­age its place and name link­ing. He is a bigot for open source, XML, TEI, XSL and (lat­terly) RDF and linked data.In past lives Sebastian has a degree in Clas­sics and Mod­ern Greek from Oxford and an MA in Archae­ology from Lon­don. He worked as a field archae­olo­gist, was a com­puter sci­ence lec­turer at Southamp­ton (where he was an early teacher of human­it­ies com­put­ing, and archae­olo­gical com­put­ing), and had a stint as pub­lic­a­tion meth­ods spe­cial­ist for Elsevier Sci­ence. He spent much of the 1990s in the world of the TeX type­set­ting system.Sebastian has co-authored two books on TeX, edited many sets of con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings, writ­ten many art­icles, is the author of a slew of TeX– and TEI-related soft­ware, has presen­ted at many archae­olo­gical com­put­ing, TeX and XML con­fer­ences, and taught prac­tical courses around the world.

Tim Dav­ies

Tim Dav­ies works at the inter­sec­tion of open tech­no­lo­gies and social change. He is co-director of Prac­tical Par­ti­cip­a­tion, a con­sultancy spe­cial­ising in rights-based approaches to youth and civic par­ti­cip­a­tion. He is cur­rently cur­ator of AidInfoLabs.org, a plat­form bring­ing together com­munit­ies, tools and tech­no­lo­gies to work with open data from the Inter­na­tional Aid Trans­par­ency Ini­ti­at­ive (IATI), and is work­ing with IKM Emer­gent on demon­strator pro­jects explor­ing the use of linked open data to com­mu­nic­ate inter­na­tional devel­op­ment research find­ings. He is cre­ator of the Open Data Cook Book wiki, col­lat­ing prac­tical how to guid­ance for non-technical users to make sense of open data. Tim’s MSc work at the Oxford Inter­net Insti­tute in 2010 was titled ‘Open Data, Demo­cracy and Pub­lic Sec­tor Reform’ and explored how UK open gov­ern­ment data was being used in prac­tice. From Octo­ber 2011 Tim will be study­ing for PhD in Web Sci­ence and Social Policy at the Uni­ver­sity of Southamp­ton. Tim is a mem­ber of the Advis­ory Coun­cil to Open Rights Group, and the Dynamic Youth Coali­tion on Inter­net Gov­ernance. He blogs at http://www.timdavies.org.uk, tweets as @timdavies, and writes on open data at http://www.practicalparticipation.co.uk/odi/

Tony Gra­ham

Tony Gra­ham is an inde­pend­ent con­sult­ant who has been work­ing with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSL/XSLT since 1998. He is an invited expert on the W3C Work­ing Group defin­ing the XSL FO spe­cific­a­tion, an acknow­ledged expert in XSLT, developer of the open source xml­roff XSL format­ter, a com­mit­ter to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT test­ing frame­works, the author of “Uni­code: A Primer”, a mem­ber of the XML Guild, and a qual­i­fied trainer.Tony’s career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, and Ire­land, work­ing with data in Eng­lish, Chinese, Japan­ese, and Korean, and with aca­demic, auto­mot­ive, pub­lish­ing, soft­ware, and tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions applic­a­tions. He has also spoken about XML, XSLT, XSL FO, EPUB, and related tech­no­lo­gies to cli­ents and con­fer­ences in North Amer­ica, Europe, and Australia.