Faculty 2017

 

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
a
meal or in the bar.

The Faculty Board operates under the stewardship of Course Director, Dr Lauren Wood.
Each year it decides on the appropriate courses and curriculum and invites the
fantastic array of experts to prepare and deliver classes.

Adam Retter | Dr Andy Seaborne | Ann Wrightson | Cathy Dolbear | Claire Hainsworth | Debbie Lapeyre | Florent Georges | Gary Cornelius | Irina Bolychevsky | Jen Williams | Professor John Chelsom | Kal Ahmed | Dr Lauren Wood | Matt Patterson | Dr Michael Kay | Nic Gibson | Norm Walsh | Dr Peter Flynn | Dr Peter Krautzberger | Priscilla Walmsley | Dr Steve Neale | Dr Stuart Williams | Tomos Hillman | Tony Graham |

Faculty Board Members

Debbie Lapeyre

Debbie Lapeyre

Debbie Lapeyre is a developer of XML Tag Sets (vocabularies) who designs and
writes the schemas (DTD, XSD, RELAX NG) that model those vocabularies. She
serves as the architect/design team member for ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015 JATS:
Journal Article Tag Suite, which is currently the worldwide de facto standard
for XML tagging of journal articles. She performs the same roles for BITS (Book
Interchange Tag Suite), the NLM sponsored book tag set based on JATS and also
for NISO STS (NISO Standards Tag Suite), which is in development for tagging
national and international standards. 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 developing prototype XSLT
applications. Ms. Lapeyre has been working with XML, XSLT, and XPath since their
inception and with SGML (XML’s predecessor) since 1984. She is a member of the
XML Guild and a co-chair of Balisage: The Markup Conference, She
previously co-chaired “Extreme Markup Languages”, “Markup Technologies”, and the
annual international “SGML/XML’XX Conference”. Debbie 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.

Debbie teaches in the Hands-On Introduction to XML course.

Professor John Chelsom

John Chelsom

John is the XML Summer School Symposiarch. He founded the Summer School with
colleagues from CSW in 2000 and has taught every year since.

John chairs the Hands-On Introduction to XML course and the XML Primer course and teaches in the Hands-On Introduction to XML course and the XML Primer course.

Dr Lauren Wood

Lauren Wood

Lauren Wood is the Course Director for the XML Summer School, and Managing Editor
for XML.com. She is also an independent XML consultant with many years of
experience in a variety of roles and areas, most recently programming XSLT for a
US-based legislative system and healthcare (HL7 CDA and FHIR), and Schematron
for journals (JATS), as well as designing and coding the XML.com website using
Django.

While with Sun Microsystems she was program manager for an innovative
cloud+mobile project that had many of the features of today’s smartphone
systems, as well as representing Sun in the Liberty Alliance, and working on
other identity and privacy-focussed projects. As Director of Product Technology
for SoftQuad, she had significant input into SoftQuad’s XMetaL XML editor. She
chaired the US XML Conference from 2001 to 2005, chaired the W3C DOM Working
Group from its inception to the end of Level 2, and played an active role in
many other OASIS and W3C technical committees.

Lauren has been a Faculty member of the Summer School since the beginning. She
occasionally blogs on issues
technical and otherwise.

Lauren chairs the Hands-on Digital Publishing course and the Trends and Transients course and teaches in the Hands-on Digital Publishing course.

Norm Walsh

Norm 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. Until
recently, Norm has also been an active participant in a number of standards
efforts worldwide: he was chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group at the
W3C where he was also co-chair of the XML Core Working Group. At OASIS, he was
chair of the DocBook Technical Committee for many years.

With two decades 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.

Norm teaches in the Hands-on Digital Publishing course and the XML in Publishing course.

Dr Peter Flynn

Peter Flynn

Peter Flynn has over 30 years experience in IT and information management. He
currently manages the electronic publishing unit at University College Cork, and
also has his own text management consultancy, Silmaril Consultants, where he works mainly with industrial production
and research systems.

Peter 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
recently completed a PhD in User
Interfaces to Structured Documents
with the Human Factors Research Group
in UCC.

In what’s left of his time he likes to cook, surf, read, and listen to early
music.

Peter chairs the XML in Publishing course and teaches in the Hands-on Digital Publishing course.

Dr Peter Krautzberger

Peter Krautzberger

Peter is an independent consultant, working primarily with clients in scientific
publishing on web-centric content and development workflows. In particular, he
manages the MathJax Consortium, a joint
venture of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for
Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), known for its mathematical rendering
solutions for the web. He is an invited expert at the W3C Digital Publishing
Interest Group and co-chairs the Math-on-webpages Community Group. He received a
PhD in mathematics from the Freie Universität Berlin.

Peter teaches in the Trends and Transients course.

Priscilla Walmsley

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), content management and
service-oriented architectures.

Priscilla was a member of the W3C XML Schema Working Group from 1999 to 2004,
where she served as an Invited Expert. She is the author of Definitive XML Schema
(Prentice Hall PTR, 2001), and XQuery (O’Reilly Media, 2007). In addition, she co-authored Web Service Contract
Design and Versioning for SOA
(Prentice Hall 2008).

Priscilla chairs the XSLT and XQuery course and teaches in the XSLT and XQuery course.

Faculty Members

Adam Retter

Adam Retter

Adam Retter is both an independent consultant and a co-founder of eXist Solutions GmbH. Adam has been
working with XML technologies and contributing to eXist since 2005. He has almost 15 years
of experience in building Web Applications and Distributed Application
Architectures. Adam has worked with many different technologies and programming
languages in the past, but has been particularly enjoying XQuery and Scala over
the last few years. Adam is passionate about Open Source and Open Standards. As
such he is an invited expert on the W3C XQuery Working Group and sits on the
peer-review panels of the XML Prague, Balisage, and XML London conferences. Adam also
founded the EXQuery project in early 2009,
and has since been working with the XML 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

Adam teaches in the XSLT and XQuery course.

Dr Andy Seaborne

Andy Seaborne

Andy has been working on the storage and query of RDF data, first as a researcher
at HPLabs, then at Epimorphics and now at
TopQuadrant. Andy has been a long time
contributor to the SPARQL standardization process. He started as a member of the
W3C RDF Data Access Working Group and was a member of the W3C SPARQL Working
Group. Andy co-edited the query language specification and lead the proposal
submission for SPARQL Update. He also served on the W3C RDF Working Group. He
also works on Apache Jena, an
open source RDF framework for Java, where he contributes to 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 teaches in the Linked Data course.

Ann Wrightson

Ann Wrightson

In the late ‘70s I left the University of Cambridge with a BA in Philosophy and
an even stronger addiction to books than when I left school, so it’s no wonder
that my first job was in publishing. I’d also acquired a fascination for logic
and some programming skills, so my first job was actually as a programmer in the
brave (fairly) new world of electronic publishing. I spent the next thirteen
years in that little-world, including seeing the European side of SGML
standardization at first hand, and helping start off the SGML Users Group. Then
I was made redundant from a project to build a newspaper system, picked up a
temporary lectureship to keep the family and spent the next ten years as an
academic paying more attention to formal methods, systems analysis & human
computer interaction than to markup.

When XML came along I was gradually pulled back into markup languages and
standards, & ended up playing seriously with Topic Maps and eGovernment
interoperability standards in the early 2000s. By 2004 I was in my first HL7 CDA
project and gradually the rest of the world dropped away as I strayed further
& further into Health Informatics. These days I’m an enterprise architect
who (oddly) goes hands-on with systems analysis & data mapping rather than
networks or coding, and gets all geeky about interoperability payloads and end
to end semantic integrity.

(photo credit to Ken Rubin, kenrubinphotography.com)

Ann teaches in the Trends and Transients course.

Cathy Dolbear

Cathy Dolbear

Cathy Dolbear is currently a Senior Link Architect at Oxford University Press,
working on the semantic enrichment of journals and book content, for linking,
search and SEO. She is interested in the intersection between semantic, content,
product and user data and how linked data paradigms can support their
management. She has recently implemented a taxonomy management system for use
across the Press, bringing together disparate workflows for taxonomy management
in different publishing groups. She holds a DPhil in Information Engineering
from the University of Oxford, is the author of the book “Linked Data: A
geographic perspective”, and holds several patents in personalisation and
multimedia technologies. She previously worked as a research scientist
investigating geospatial semantics and geographical linked data at Ordnance
Survey, and has held roles in multimedia applications research at Motorola and
Sharp Labs.

Cathy teaches in the Linked Data course.

Claire Hainsworth

Claire Hainsworth

Claire has worked for the Environment Agency for nearly 16 years. Her roles have
included developing and implementing data management services, most notably
ensuring and leading the delivery of a Defra wide metadata service. Claire has
implemented the Public Registers Online service which is an element of the
Environment Agency’s Data Sharing Platform. She is now the National Lead for the
Environment Agency’s Data Sharing Services which includes managing the Linked
Data Platform. This is strategic role that ensures the significant investment we
get meets business needs and outcomes. This role helps both the Environment
Agency and their customers realise the potential and power of their data.

Claire teaches in the Linked Data course.

Florent Georges

Florent Georges

Since Florent discovered IT back in
the 90’s, he has always been fascinated by how data are stored and represented.
He naturally came to XML, but also to RDF and Semantic Technologies.

Florent contributed to many open-source and community-driven projects in the
field of XML. His main interests are in the field of XSLT and XQuery extensions
and libraries, packaging, unit and functional testing, and portability between
several processors. But it is only with the advent of NoSQL technologies and
transactional triplestores that Florent started to consider using Semantics and
the flexibility of its data model in commercial projects.

Florent is an invited expert in the XSLT
working group
at W3C, since 2009. Florent founded EXPath the same year,
and is also the chair of the EXPath
community group
at W3C, defining “standard” extension function libraries
that can be used in XPath (so in XSLT, XQuery and XProc as well). Florent and
H2O Consulting are members of the XML Guild, “a consortium of some of the best independent XML
consultants in the world.” He worked for two years for MarkLogic, the
“Enterprise NoSQL Database”, helping many of their clients with their data
projects and challenges.

H2O Consulting website is at http://h2oconsulting.be/. Florent is currently working as a Semantic
Data Architect, helping a leading banking group in Paris defining their new data
management strategies and systems.

Florent teaches in the XSLT and XQuery course.

Gary Cornelius

Gary Cornelius

Gary Cornelius is the founder of Rapport Network
CIC
, which is an established Community Interest Company that produces
assisted living applications for early-stage dementia and for people with other
cognitive impairments who find it challenging to live independently. Gary has
experience of IT consultancy and development for the NHS, with a particular
interest in health informatics, middleware systems, and the Internet of Things.

Gary is an experienced XML consultant and solutions architect. Gary has been an
active contributor to XML mailing lists and standards for over a decade and
enjoys technical project management involving XML. He studied publishing,
graphic communication management, and digital imaging.

Gary was involved with the engineering of many XML based innovations and products
over the years such as XML base databases, CMS systems, Electronic Health
Records Systems, application performance managements systems, various multimodal
user interface systems and several knowledge management and decision support
systems. He has developed several XML and web related training courses for IT
engineers and managers.

In 2002 Gary was a delegate attending the XML Summer School and for the following
years he has returned as a speaker and instructor.

Gary teaches in the Hands-On Introduction to XML course.

Irina Bolychevsky

Irina Bolychevsky

Irina is passionate about products and
using technology to make things better. She spent many years working on open
data at Open Knowledge (as one of the directors
and ckan product owner), at web startups, and
recently as a data consultant for W3C, Open Data Institute and the UK and Dubai
governments. She co-founded redecentralize.org — a project to promote and bring
together people working on and interested in decentralised digital
technologies.

Irina teaches in the Trends and Transients course.

Jen Williams

Jen Williams

Jen Williams is a software developer and data consultant at Networked Planet. She spends the
majority of her time devising and building standards-based .NET linked data
management and publishing platforms.

Outside of her development work, Jen is a member of the Bristol ODI Node steering group, helps
organise Open Data Camp UK, and this year
started a Tech4Good
meetup in Bristol.

Jen teaches in the Linked Data course.

Kal Ahmed

Kal Ahmed

Kal Ahmed is founder of NetworkedPlanet, a software house specializing in standards-based
knowledge and content management solutions for Microsoft platforms. In previous
jobs he has worked for Xerox in XML document management systems; for Ontopia in
developing and deploying Topic Maps-based solutions; and as an independent
consultant with a focus on XML, Topic Maps and RDF.

Kal is a contributor to dotNetRDF, an
open-source platform for RDF-based applications that use the Microsoft .NET
framework; and to BrightstarDB, an
open-source RDF triple-store for .NET as well as playing around in a few other
interesting applications in linked data over on github (github.com/kal and github.com/brightstardb). What is
left of his spare time is now entirely consumed by photographing and playing roller
derby.

Kal teaches in the Linked Data course.

Matt Patterson

Matt Patterson

Most recently CTO of German streaming-video startup Tape.tv, Matt has been
building for the web for more than 15 years. A full-stack developer, over the
years he has worked for the BBC, been
involved with a critically acclaimed indie
videogame
, explored data visualisations of the evolution of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, helped the UK government
reboot its approach to the web as part of the GOV.uk Alpha and Beta team, helped Europe’s biggest municipal authority
build a Civic Dashboard, transformed a large biographical dictionary from Word files to a website,
co-organised UIKonf (Europe’s leading iOS
developer conference), and spent three years helping lead the charge for
artist-driven music television at Tape.tv. He is currently exploring new ideas
in the Digital Humanities. He has spoken at conferences on both sides of the
Atlantic, and once co-authored a book about CSS. He also helps out at the Ruby Monstas, a study group born out of Rails Girls Berlin.

He has long experience with web development and XML technologies and a wealth of
knowledge about transforming and working with structured and semi-structured
data. If you have data locked away in Word, Excel, OpenOffice, CSV, databases or
XML that you want to publish on the web he can teach you how to get to it, work
with it, and begin to publish it.

Matt teaches in the Hands-on Digital Publishing course.

Dr Michael Kay

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 teaches in the XSLT and XQuery course.

Nic Gibson

Nic Gibson

Nic Gibson is an independent consultant, working on XML and digital publishing
technologies for a variety of publishers and organisations that publish. He
specialises in advising publishers on suitable uses of XML and the
implementation of complex transformation pipelines using XSLT and XProc. He also
provides XML and XSLT training to his clients and on public courses.

Nic has spent most of the last two years working for LexisNexis UK as Lead
Content Architect, leading a team of content architects and developers who
manage the schemas and transformations used to publish tens of thousands of
legal precedents to the web and print.

Nic teaches in the XML in Publishing course.

Dr Steve Neale

Steve Neale

Steve Neale is a Research Associate at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. Since joining Cardiff in 2016 he has
worked primarily on the CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes / National Corpus of
Contemporary Welsh) project, working on various aspects of corpus infrastructure
ranging from data storage and web-based interfaces for querying the corpus to
various associated natural language processing (NLP) tools. He previously worked
as a postdoctoral researcher with the NLX – Natural Language and Speech Group at
the University of Lisbon in Portugal, where he had been working since 2014 after
completing his PhD at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

Steve’s primary research interests are in NLP, machine learning and artificial
intelligence. Besides having worked with XML as part of numerous NLP tools and
language technology resources, Steve is now particularly interested in exploring
the use of XML, RDF and OWL in linked open data (LOD) and in the practical uses
of LOD for NLP.

Steve teaches in the Trends and Transients course.

Dr Stuart Williams

Stuart Williams

Dr Stuart Williams is a linked data practitioner and enthusiast who has have been
working in the field of semantic web and linked data standards, technologies,
and applications for more than 15 years. Prior to joining Epimorphics in 2009,
Stuart was a member of the Semantic Web research group at HP Labs in Bristol
where he worked on the application of semantic web technologies to the
description and coordination of web services (so-called semantic web web
services); software configuration management; and the management of system
access entitlements in a regulated environment. He also served as co-chair of
the W3C TAG for a number
of years. At Epimorphics he works with a number of public and private clients
helping them to model and publish their data as open linked data.

Even longer ago, Stuart was a major contributor to the protocol specifications of
the IrDA, who promoted a set of wireless
infrared data communication standards for consumer devices that have largely
been displaced from todays gadets by bluetooth and wifi.

Stuart teaches in the Linked Data course.

Tomos Hillman

Tomos Hillman

Tom is an independent consultant and director of eXpertML Ltd, offering
consultancy on publishing with XML, training, and freelance expertise in XSLT
and related technologies.

Until very recently he was a Senior Data Engineer for Oxford University Press,
where he was responsible for the design and maintenance of custom data models
for books and legal materials. His job role included XML processing, supplier
documentation, and quality control systems. He also advised on digital workflows
and strategy, and writes and delivered internal training.

Tomos teaches in the XML in Publishing course.

Tony Graham

Tony Graham

Tony Graham is a Senior Architect with Antenna House, where he works on their XSL-FO and CSS
formatter
, cloud-based authoring
solution
, and related products. He also provides XSL-FO and XSLT
consulting and training services on behalf of Antenna House.

Tony has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with
XSLT/XSL-FO since 1998. He is Chair of the Print and Page Layout Community
Group
at the W3C and previously an invited expert on the W3C XML Print
and Page Layout Working Group (XPPL) defining the XSL-FO specification, as well
as an acknowledged expert in XSLT. Tony is the developer of the ‘stf‘ Schematron testing
framework and also Antenna House’s ‘focheck‘ XSL-FO
validation tool, a committer to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT testing
frameworks, the author of “Unicode: A Primer”, and a qualified
trainer.

Tony’s career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, UK, and Ireland. Before joining
Antenna House, he had previously been an independent consultant, a Staff
Engineer with Sun Microsystems, a Senior Consultant with Mulberry Technologies,
and a Document Analyst with Uniscope. He has worked 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, Japan, and Australia.

Tony teaches in the XML in Publishing course.