Extreme 2007 Speakers

Moody E. Altamimi
Moody Altamimi is currently a doctoral candidate at the George Washington University, Department of Computer Science. She has a Masters of Science degree from The George Washington University in Software Engineering. Her research interests include information retrieval with focus on the search and retrieval of mathematical content, design and analysis of computer algorithms, XML-based technologies (MathML, XPath/XQuery), and object-oriented methodologies. She has also worked in industry with commerce-enabled Web technologies.

Roy Amodeo
Roy Amodeo is a Senior Software Archtect with the ePublishing Solutions Group at Stilo International. After cutting his teeth as a real-time systems programmer in the telecommunications industry, he joined Stilo (then called Software Exoterica) to help develop a state of the art content processing language called OmniMark. Over his 15 years at the company he has been both a builder and user of OmniMark, applying it to problems in a range of industries from aerospace to legal publishing to software development itself. (OmniMark is actually used to build itself.) Roy has been actively involved in a variety of recent solutions initiatives that have leveraged emerging markup standards, including DITA and S1000D, to manage and process highly modularized content. Roy is also currently hard at work revamping the OmniMark training program to address the growing demands within large organizations for standards-based content processing solutions that can rise to the challenges being seen within increasingly high-volume performance-driven publishing environments.

David J. Birnbaum
David J. Birnbaum is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been involved in the study of electronic text technology since the mid-1980s, has delivered presentations at several Extreme Markup and other electronic text technology conferences, and has served on the board of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the editorial board of Markup Languages: Theory and Practice, and the Text Encoding Initiative Council. Much of his electronic text work intersects with his research in medieval Slavic manuscript studies, but he also often writes about issues in the philosophy of markup.

Mario Blažević
Mario Blažević has a Master's degree in Computer Science from University of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. Since moving to Canada in 2000, he has been working for OmniMark Technologies, later acquired by Stilo International plc., mostly in the area of markup processing and on development of the OmniMark programming language.

Martin Bryan
Martin Bryan learnt the term "markup" at school more than 40 years ago, working in hot-metal in the school printing club. Since then he has followed the evolution of markup languages from the ISO standardization of proofreaders marks to the latest batch of specialized XML-based markup languages.

Whilst not the longest serving member of the documentation preparation standards committees, Martin is one of the old timers, having put in 20 years of service for ISO and related standards bodies. He currently chairs the ISO working group creating a new generation of Document Schema Definition Languages, which includes RELAX NG, Schematron and his own "baby", the Document Schema Renaming Language (DSRL).

Recent research at CSW has led Martin to study the many possible roles of ontologies. After many years of study of various languages for the modelling information, he was not expecting to find that there was yet another language about to emerge. The power of OWL for modelling and configuring data using markup languages came as a pleasant surprise.

Jean Carletta
Jean Carletta is a Senior Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh's Language Technology Group. She has been looking at ways of representing overlapping linguistic structures since being involved in production of the HCRC Map Task Corpus in the early 1990's. She has led SGML and XML-related developments on a series of European projects culminating in the NITE XML Toolkit, which uses multiple file stand-off to support the distributed production and analysis of heavily annotated language corpora.

Rui Castro
Rui Castro, haivng completed a degree in Systems and Informatics Engineering from the University of Minho, worked in 2003 at Siemens, S.A as a trainee programmer in the construction of an analysis tool for third-generation mobile networks. In 2003, he started as a collaborator in the Centro de Computação Gráfica where he worked on various research and development projects in diverse areas such as Computer Graphics, Semantic Web, Content Management, etc. Since 2006, he has been a programmer and investigator for the RODA project.

Jay Cousins
Jay Cousins is an Senior Consultant at CSW, a company specialising in helping businesses adopt XML technologies for the creation, management, and distribution of information. Jay works in business information analysis and modelling, specializing in the development of XML based architectures such as for NewsML and AdsML.

Jay has an M.Sc. in Analysis, Design, and Management of Information Systems from the London School of Economics, and a BA (Hons) in English with Comparative Literature from the University of East Anglia. He also studied at the Universität Salzburg, Austria under the ERASMUS exchange programme.

Antonina Dattolo
Antonina Dattolo is an research associate at the Department of Mathematics and Applications "R. Caccioppoli" at the University of Naples Federico II. She holds a Laurea degree in Computer Science from the University of Salerno and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Naples Federico II. Her research interests include markup languages; concurrent architectures for distributed hypermedia models; and software agents. She is the author of several papers on distributed hypermedia models.

Michael M David
Mike has unique experience with integrating relational and hierarchical data such as XML. He has been an invited speaker and author of articles and papers on this subject, has written the first book on ANSI SQL hierarchical data modeling and structure processing published by Artech House, and was an initial member of the ANSI SQLX group along with IBM, Oracle and Microsoft representatives researching the integration of XML into SQL. Before founding Advanced Data Access Technologies, Mike worked for NCR/Teradata as a staff scientist and their lead XML architect. He has a rare understanding of the weaknesses of the current level of SQL-based XML integration products and has developed solutions to remedy them and support other advanced capabilities previously thought not possible using standard SQL.

Brian Demmings
Brian Demmings is a Masters in Science in Computer Science candidate at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. His current area of research are filtering compressed XML and storage systems, however, his interests extend into XML Compression and P2P-based systems.

Angelo Di Iorio
Angelo Di Iorio holds a Laurea degree and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bologna. His research interests include content management systems, web technologies, markup languages and digital publishing.

Silvia Duca
Silvia Duca holds a Laurea degree in Computer Science from the University of Bologna. Her research interests include web-semantic, web technologies, ontologies and markup languages.

Kilian Evang
Kilian Evang is a B.A. student of Computational Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, where he is also involved in a project on Sustainability of Linguistic Resources.

Luís Francisco da Cunha Cardoso de Faria
Luís Francisco de Cunha Cardoso de Faria completed a degree in Systems and Informatics Engineering from the University of Minho, Portugal, in 2006, during which he had the opportunity to be a Summer Student at CERN in 2004. He has now integrated the development team for a research project of the Portuguese National Archives (Direcção Geral de Arquivos).

Antonio Angelo Feliziani
Antonio Angelo Feliziani holds a Laurea degree in Computer Science from the University of Bologna. His research interests include document management systems, web technologies, markup languages and e-Learning.

Miguel Ferreira
Having graduated as a Systems and Informatics Engineer, Miguel Ferreira has worked as a consultant at the Arquivo Distrital do Porto (Oporto's Archive) and as a researcher at the University of Minho. Since 2003 he has been publishing in the field of digital archives/libraries and preservation. Currently, he is developing work as a PhD student and coordinating several research projects at the Arquivo Distrital do Porto and the Portuguese National Archives (Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais/Torre do Tombo).

Lee Fesperman
Lee Fesperman is a software veteran having implemented operating systems, compilers, interpreters and assemblers at IBM in the early 70s. With the advent of relational technology, he implemented a number SQL RDBMSs. He is a prominent figure in the database industry having participated in the great “Null Debate”, co-founding the Database Debunkings site along with C. J. Date and Fabian Pascal, and authoring a popular "SQL Tutorial" used world wide by thousands of database developers'. Lee is also a pioneer in ODBC drivers implementing one of the first ODBC drivers and participating in defining the ODBC 3.0 specification. For this contribution, he is listed in Ken North’s ODBC Hall of Fame. Lee is a known expert in the Java Programming Language and has developed JDBC Drivers for several leading database products. He is also a frequent contributor to Java newsgroups and magazines. He is the author of FirstSQL a Java Object-Relational Database System downloadable from www.firstsql.com.

Eric Freese
Eric Freese is a consulting software engineer with LexisNexis. He has nearly 20 years of experience in the areas of document, information, and knowledge management with specific expertise in the development and implementation of XML technologies. His experience includes research, analysis, specification, design, development, testing, implementation, integration and management of information systems in a wide range of environments. He has significant research experience in human interface design, graphics interface development and artificial intelligence. Freese was a founding member of TopicMaps.Org, the organization that developed the XML Topic Maps (XTM) specification, and served as the chairman of this group. He continues to strive to build the Star Trek computer so his mother will finally understand what he does for a living.

Rick Jelliffe
Rick Jelliffe is the editor of the ISO standard for Schematron and CTO of Topologi Pty. Ltd.

Rick has worked as a musician, model, banana farmer, ice salesman, project manager, programmer, and company director. He first learned SGML when working in Japan as a technical editor in the late 1980s, and co-developed an early XML-sized document conversion system (a custom LISP implementation.) This lead to an involvement with Australia's Allette Systems that continues as co-founders of a technolgy company Topologi, and involvement many large markup projects. Rick has been involved in ISO, W3C and IETF standards such as WebSGML, XML, XML Schemas, and has a particular interest in internationalization (especially Eastern Asian issues) and schema languages (especially user-oriented languages.) He is a regular conference and seminar speaker, especially in the Eastern hemisphere: recent seminars have been on the topics XML, Schematron, XSLT and Open XML (for Microsoft).

Rick is a published author, regularly acts as technical editor on books from major publishers and has a technical blog at OReilly.com. His geek credibility skyrocketed recently when he was mentioned on comedy show The Colbert Report in connection with Wikigate: a scandal that erupted when Microsoft offered to pay him to edit some Wikipedia articles into a neutral point of view.

Kevin Jones
Kevin Jones is a principle engineer and architect for XML processing at Intel®. He has worked on software XML processing solutions for several years concentrating on XSLT processing and Web services security. He joined Intel via the acquisition of Sarvega Inc, an XML appliance vendor, in August 2005. At Sarvega he led much of the XML core software development that enabled the appliance solutions to be performance competitive.

Michael Kay
Michael Kay is the developer of the Saxon open-source XSLT and XQuery engine, and the founder of Saxonica Limited which develops and markets the technology. He is the editor of the XSLT 2.0 specification and author of reference books on XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0.

Jonathan Khoo
Jonathan Khoo is a Masters student in the International Studies in Computational Linguistics program at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He received his BA in Linguistics from Northwestern University in 1998. Between his studies, he worked as a web developer focusing on browser-based replacements for traditional rich-client applications. He is currently writing his MA thesis on one aspect of this paper.

Pekka Kilpeläinen
Pekka Kilpeläinen is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Kuopio, Finland. He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki in 1993. His research interests are centered around the theory and practice of processing structured documents and XML. Prof. Kilpeläinen has been involved in the academia for example with designing tools such as a structured-text search tool called sgrep, an SGML transformation language called TranSID, and a declarative XML conversion language called XW.

Jirka Kosek
Jirka Kosek is a freelance XML consultant and teacher at University of Economics in Prague. He has over ten years experience in providing XML consultancy and training. Jirka is an active member in several standardization bodies: OASIS (DocBook TC and RELAX NG TC), W3C (XSL WG and ITS WG) and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 (DSDL, Topic Maps).

Jirka Kosek is an author of several books about Web technologies. He also wrote numerous articles for IT developer magazines. In his free time he is contributing code into DocBook XSL stylesheets open-source project.

David Lee
David Lee has over 20 years experience in the software industry responsible for many major projects in small and large companies including Sun Microsystems, IBM, Centura Software (formerly Gupta.), Premenos, Epiphany (formerly RightPoint), WebGain. As senior member of the technical staff of Epocrates, Inc., Mr. Lee is responsible for managing data integration, storage, retrieval, and processing of clinical knowledge databases for the leading clinical information provider. Key career contributions include Real-time AIX OS extensions for optimizing transmission of real-time streaming video (IBM), secure encrypted EDI over internet email (Premenos), porting Centura Team Developer, a complex 4GL development system, from Win32 to Solaris (Gupta, Centura), optimizations of large Enterprise CRM systems (Epiphany), implementation of ecommerce systems for on-demand digital printing and CD replication (Nexstra).

Gregory Leighton
Gregory Leighton is a Ph.D. student at the University of Calgary. His current research interests include XML data management and the Semantic Web.

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.

Giovani Rubert Librelotto
Giovani Rubert Librelotto is a professor of Computer Science, Information Systems and Master in Nanoscience at Franciscan University Center - UNIFRA, Brazil. He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Minho in 2005, in Portugal. Prof. Librelotto has been involved in research around processing structured documents, XML, and topic maps. In the last years, he has been involved in several topic maps and bioinformatics projects.

Sylvain Loiseau
Sylvain Loiseau received a PhD in linguistics from the University of Paris-X in 2006 and he is currently holding a post-doctoral position at LIMSI (CNRS / University Paris-Sud). His research focuses on corpus linguistics involving large and extensively annotated corpora for quantitative contrastive discours analysis. He makes extensive use of the TEI Guidelines and has been developped an XML-based software for analysing TEI-annotated corpora.

Henrique Tamiosso Machado
Henrique Tamiosso Machado holds a degree in Information Systems at UNIFRA, Brazil. He also is specialist in Administration of the Information Systems at UFLA, Brazil. Currently he is a Master in Nanoscience‚s degree candidate at UNIFRA, Brazil. He is Computer Science professor at URI, Brazil.

Yves Marcoux
Yves Marcoux is a faculty member at EBSI (École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information), University of Montréal, since 1991. He is involved in teaching, research, standardization, and international cooperation activities in the fields of structured documents, information retrieval, database systems, and digital information management. Prior to his appointment at EBSI, Dr. Marcoux 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 Université de Montréal in 1991. His main research interests are document theory, structured document implementation methodologies, and information retrieval in structured documents. He is author of many research reports and scientific articles on various aspects of structured documents. Since 1995, he has led numerous projects related to XML and SGML theory and practice. He is solicited as an expert on digital information management and structured documents on a regular basis. He has been co-responsible for the Digital Information Management Certificate at EBSI, from its creation in 2000, to 2005. Through GRDS (Groupe départemental de recherche sur les documents structurés), 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 the Québec Treasury Board.

Paolo Marinelli
Paolo Marinelli holds a Master Degree in Computer Science at the University of Bologna. The topic of his Master Thesis regards SchemaPath, the conservative extension of XML Schema for expressing conditional content models and co-constraints, partially described in this paper.

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, since 1985. 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 information systems to support the classification community at DOE's Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Long an enthusiast of the pipe organ and its music, Dr. Mason studied organ design in graduate school and has visited and heard many major organs in Europe and North America.

Mirkos Ortiz Martins
Mirkos Ortiz Martins holds a degree in Computer Science from UFSM, Santa Maria, Brasil and he is a Master´s degree candidate from UNIFRA, Santa Maria, Brasil in Nanoscience. In 2003-2006 was teacher of Java Development from Web and Advanced Databases in IESVILLE - Technology and Cultural Institute, Joinville, Brasil. At same town, he was an Java Framework Analyst and XML researcher. Usually he is studing about quantum computer.

Mary McRae
As Manager of Technical Committee Administration for OASIS, Mary McRae provides front-line support for OASIS committees and the standards they produce. She works with OASIS TC chairs, guiding them through the OASIS technical process and helping them reach the goals and objectives of their charters. Mary also serves on the OASIS Technical Advisory Board. She joined the OASIS staff in 2004, but she has been an active member of the Consortium since 1995, serving on the OASIS Board of Directors in 1999. Mary became involved in structured markup languages in 1992, while working for Butterworth Legal Publishers, where she mastered the nuances of document analysis, DTD development, structured editors, and content management systems. Later, as Vice President of XML Solutions and Principal XML Technologist for DMSi, she used her skills at project management, needs analysis, requirements definition, product selection, schema development, application customization, and training to help clients avoid the pitfalls she encountered herself as an early adopter. Sandwiched in between, Mary was the Manager of Sales Support for Xyvision (now XyEnterprise), focusing on SGML/XML content management solutions. Mary is co-author of "Office 2003 XML" and a frequent speaker at industry conferences. In her spare time, Mary is a textile artist. She is based in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, USA.

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 over seventy papers and four books, including "C++ Programming with Design Patterns Revealed" and "C for Java Programmers". 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, P2P systems and algorithm explanation.

Petr Nalevka
Petr Nalevka is an IT consultant with over 8 years extensive experience across a variety of IT projects using contemporary enterprise-level web-based and server-side technologies. The highlights include development and architecture of an modular billing system for large ISPs, distributed system for stock indexes calculation and other projects for governmental institutions or international banks.

Moreover, Petr works on development and maintenance of Relaxed and JNVDL, both open source projects. Relaxed is a web document validation service and JNVDL is a Java implementation of the NVDL international standard for compound document validation. This work is sponsored by an academical grant.

Steve Pepper
Steve Pepper is an independent researcher, writer and lecturer who has worked with open standards for structured information for over two decades. He has represented Norway on ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, the ISO subcommittee for document description languages, since 1995, and convened the Topic Maps Working Group since it was founded. He was the editor of the XML Topic Map specification (XTM) in 2001 and has published numerous papers and presentations on Topic Maps-related subjects, including the well-known “TAO of Topic Maps”.

A frequent speaker at XML, Topic Maps, and knowledge management events around the world, Steve was for many years the author and maintainer of the “Whirlwind Guide to SGML and XML tools”. He also co-authored (with Charles Goldfarb and Chet Ensign) the “SGML Buyer's Guide” (Prentice-Hall, 1998).

In 2000 Steve founded Ontopia, which became the world's premier provider of Topic Maps technology. His current research focus is on subject-centric computing applications based on the Topic Maps standard. He also lectures at the University College of Oslo, writes for various publications, including the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, and chairs the annual Topic Maps Users Conference.

Thomas Passin
Thomas Passin has been working with XML-related technologies since 1998. He helped to create the XML version of the message set in SAE J2354 Advanced Traveler Information Systems, and has created a number of demonstration applications that use XML, XSLT, and Python technologies together. He also consults at work about XML and XSLT matters, and is active on a number of related discussion lists. He is the author of the book "Explorer's Guide To The Semantic Web". Mr. Passin studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago.

Wendell Piez
Wendell Piez was born in Germany to American parents, and took his first trans-Atlantic airplane flight at age three weeks. His early years were spent in Somerset (Massachussets), Kabul (Afghanistan) and Manila (the Philippines). His first experiences with computer programming were in BASIC and 6502 Assembler (Hewlett Packard HP-9830b, Rockwell AIM 65, Radio Shack TRS-80). A graduate of the American School in Japan, he went on to receive degrees in Classics (B.A., Ancient Greek) and English (Ph.D.). He has been an active member of the global Humanities Computing community since 1994; currently he serves as General Editor of DHQ (Digital Humanities Quarterly). Since 1998, he has worked at Mulberry Technologies, Inc., an XML consultancy based in Rockville, Maryland (USA). As an XML practitioner, he is known for his work with XSLT and SVG as well as his theoretical investigations. In addition to technology, his interests include esoteric philosophies, world history, bicycling, tai chi, and fine food in unassuming venues.

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 9 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://disc.inria.fr/perso/philippe.poulard/xml/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 Métiers.

Liam Quin
Liam Quin has been working with text and markup since the early 1980s, with SGML since 1987, and with XML since before it was called XML. He is now the XML Activity Lead (also known as Mrs. XML) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is the W3C staff participant on the W3C XML Query Working Group His interests include digital representation of historical texts, barefoot hiking and schema co-occurrence constraints, and in his spare time he publishes images scanned from his collection of old and dusty books.

Liam has attended SGML and XML conferences starting with SGML 89 in Atlanta, America. He lives in a rural part of southern Ontario in Canada with his husband, and tries to avoid shoes.

José Carlos Ramalho
José Carlos Ramalho is a teacher at the Department of Informatics and a researcher at the CCTC research center.

He has a Masters on "Compiler Construction" and a Ph.D. on the subject "Structured Document Processing and Semantics". He is supervising several XML/SGML projects and acting as an external consultant for several institutions.

He also has been the chair and chief editor of the portuguese XML conference.

Georg Rehm
Georg Rehm works in Tübingen University's collaborative research centre Linguistic Data Structures in a project that develops the foundations for sustainable linguistic resources. He holds a PhD in Applied and Computational Linguistics and has been working with SGML and related technologies in the context of Natural Language Processing (especially with regard to text and corpus analysis as well as ontologies) since 1995.

Élias Rizkallah
Élias Rizkallah holds a Master's degree in Library and information science from University of Montreal, where he is currently researcher at GRDS (Groupe départemental de Recherche sur les Documents Structurés). He is also digital information manager for the International Observatory on Financial Services Cooperatives and text-mining methodologist for the Desjardins Centre for Studies in Management of Financial Services Cooperatives, both at HEC Montreal (Hautes Études Commerciales). He is currently completing a doctoral dissertation in the Department of Psychology at Laval University (Quebec, Canada), on the methodology and epistemology of research in the field of social representations.

Mikko Saesmaa
Mikko Saesmaa is an assistant of Computer Science at the University of Kuopio, Finland. He received his MSc in Computer Science in 2004. He is currently doing his postgraduate studies.

Felix Sasaki
Until 1999, Felix Sasaki studied Japanese and Linguistics in Berlin, Germany. From 1999 until 2005 he worked in the Department for Computational Linguistics and "Text Technology" in Bielefeld, Germany. As of 1 April 2005, he joined the W3C Internationalization Activity. Since June 2006, he has also been working in the W3C Web Services Activity.

Oliver Schonefeld
Oliver Schonefeld has studied computer science at Bielefeld University, Germany until 2005. Since then he is working at the department of for computational linguistics and "text technology" in at Bielefeld University.

C.M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is a member of the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium. He co-edited the XML 1.0 specification and the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative.

Kimberly A. Tryka
Kim Tryka is currently working with the PubMed Central group at NCBI to integrate documents into the dbGaP project. She has also worked on digital projects at the University of Virginia with the University Library and the Virginia Center for Digital History. Previously, she was an astronomer, studying icy objects in the outer solar system. She holds degrees in physics, planetary science, and library science.

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 IDEAlliance's Extreme Markup Language conferences 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 includ 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/

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.

Andreas Witt
Andreas Witt received his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics and Text Technology from the University of Bielefeld in 2002. After graduating in 1996, he started as a researcher and instructor in Computational Linguistics and Text Technology at Bielefeld University. He was heavily involved in the establishment of the minor subject Text Technology in Bielefeld University's Magister and B.A. program. In 2006 he moved to University of Tübingen, where he is engaged in a project on Sustainability of Linguistic Resources. Witt's main research interests deal with questions on the use and limitations of markup languages for the linguistic description of language data. He is a member of several research organizations, amongst them the TEI Special Interest Group on overlapping markup, for which he wrote parts of the latest version of the chapter "Multiple Hierarchies", which is included in TEI-Guidelines P5.

Ann 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.

Lan Yi
Lan Yi is currently working as software development manager of the XML transformation & Query team in Intel® China Software Center. Lan joined Intel® in December 2004 and worked in the XML processing acceleration project as senior software developer. Lan graduated from the School of Computing in National University of Singapore and got his Ph.D degree in 2004. His technical and research interest is focused on compilation technology, XML processing acceleration, Data Mining, Web Mining and search engine.

Andrew Young
Andrew Young was a form Bachelor of Computer Science with Honours student at Acadia University. Having graduated in 2006, Andrew is currently working in industry.

Abdou S. Youssef
Abdou Youssef received the B.S. degree in Mathematics from The Lebanese University, Lebanon, in 1981, the M.A. and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He taught for a year in 1982 at the Institute of Applied Sciences, The Lebanese University. He has been with the Department of Computer Science Computer Science (formerly Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) at The George Washington University, Washington DC, since 1987, serving as Assistant Professor from 1987 to 1993, Associate Professor starting from 1993 to 1999, and Professor since 1999. In 1994-95 he spent his Sabbatical at the National Institute of Science and Technology and, partly, at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published numerous papers in the areas of interconnection networks and computer architecture, parallel processing, fault tolerance, parallel algorithms, data compression, image processing, multimedia indexing, video processing and transmission, and watermarking. He co-edited a book titled "Interconnection Networks for High-Performance Parallel Computers", published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. He is the recipient of four Teacher of the Year Awards from the the Department and the School on Engineering and Applied Science at GWU. He is listed in the Who is Who Among America's Teachers. Professor Youssef is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of IEEE Computer Society and ACM.

Stefano Zacchiroli
Stefano Zacchiroli is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Bologna. His thesis, titled User Interaction Widgets for Interactive Theorem Proving, sits at the intersection of the type theory and human computer interaction fields. His research interests also encompass markup languages and in particular co-constraints and overlapping markup for XML-based languages.

There is nothing so practical as a good theory