Faculty Board 2011

The XML Summer School Faculty Board includes some of the biggest names in XML, who have designed the high quality curriculum and invited a fantastic array of experts to prepare and deliver classes.

The Board operates under the stewardship of Course Director, Dr Lauren Wood. The full Board is made up of the following members:

• Dr Lauren Wood (Course Director)
• Prof. John Chelsom
• Bob DuCharme
• Priscilla Walmsley
• Peter Flynn

Dr. Lauren Wood

Lauren Wood uses her skills in making projects successful, specializing in XML-based projects with distributed teams. Her major client currently is Lantana Consulting Group, a consulting company working in standards-based healthcare. She has a long history in working with XML, and before that SGML, with experience in XML projects ranging from publishing to 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 also has experience in settings where XML is used more under the covers, such as chairing the Business Marketing Expert Group for the Liberty Alliance, managing the localisation and accessibility feature teams for SoftQuad’s HoTMetaL HTML editor, and managing a project for Sun Microsystems that involved cloud computing, client-side software, and hardware design.

Lauren has been a Faculty member of the Summer School since the beginning. In her spare time she knits, renovates the house, and occasionally blogs on issues technical and otherwise.

Lauren chairs the Practical Web Applications course and the Trends and Transients course.

Professor John Chelsom

John Chelsom is a partner at Eleven Informatics LLP, a consultancy firm specialising in the application of open standards and open source software, using Agile development techniques. He is also a Visiting Professor at the City University – Centre for Health Informatics.

Previously he was founder and Managing Director of CSW Group, which was involved in the design and development of major XML systems for Ford Motor Co, Xerox Corp, the BBC and Johnson & Johnson. CSW also supplied the underlying software for probably the world’s largest XML transaction processing database delivering patient record information for the National Health Service in England. John started the XML Summer School in 2000 with colleagues from CSW.

John chairs the Hands-On Introduction to XML course.

Bob DuCharme

Bob DuCharme is a solutions architect at TopQuadrant, a company that provides software for modeling, developing and deploying semantic web applications on Windows, the Mac and Linux.

In the XML.com newsletter, editor Kendall Clark once wrote “Does anyone write tech prose as clear as Bob?” Bob is the author of Manning Publications’ “XSLT Quickly,” Prentice Hall’s “XML: The Annotated Specification” and “SGML CD,” and McGraw Hill’s “Operating Systems Handbook.” He’s written over seventy pieces for XML.com and has contributed to Dr. Dobb’s Journal, IBM developerWorks, DevX, perl.com, XML Magazine, XML Journal, XML Developer, O’Reilly Books’ “XML Hacks,” and Prentice Hall’s “XML Handbook.” Bob received his BA in Religion from Columbia University and his Masters in Computer Science from New York University. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Bob chairs the Semantic Technologies course.

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 has recently been researching the usability of editors for structured documents.

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

Peter chairs the Publishing course.

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.