Rebecca Bamford
Rebecca Bamford is a Senior Content Analyst at Bloomsbury Publishing plc, specialising in DocBook. Working within the academic and professional division, she focuses on the quality assurance and the management of XML content for digital publishing. She holds a BSc in Information Technology in Organisations from the University of Southampton and has developed over three years of XML expertise during her time at Bloomsbury Publishing.
Achim Berndzen
Achim earned an M.A. in philosophy at Aachen University and has more than 20 years of teaching experience in communications. In 2014 he founded <xml-project />. He is developer of MorganaXProc, a fully compliant XProc processor with an emphasis on configurability and plugability. He is a member of the XProc 3.0 editors group and currently develops MorganaXProc-III.
Achim also works on projects use the power of XML technologies in web applications.
Francis Cave
Francis has been involved in the development of markup language standards for almost forty years. He was a member of the expert working group that supported Charles Goldfarb in the development of ISO 8879 SGML in the mid 1980s. He is currently Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, the international standard committee responsible for the DSDL suite of markup language standards that includes RELAX NG, Schematron, NVDL and CREPDL. He is an active member of the ISO Working Group maintaining the office document file format standard ISO/IEC 29500 OOXML, and is also a co-editor of the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF). His commercial work focuses on the design and development of XML workflows for publishers.
Charafeddine Cheraa
For Charafeddine Cheraa, programming is a passion for learning and exploring different development stacks and programming languages.
He first started programming for fun using QBasic, and over time, he gained experience with various technologies, especially XML and web development-related, always eager to improve and learn more.
John Cummins
With a strong science and technology background and for over two decades, John Cummins has led a diverse range of innovative initiatives in collaboration with universities and companies. In recent years, he co-founded the Legal Technology Laboratory in the US to bring lawyers and computer scientists together on cutting-edge legal tech projects. Most recently, and in collaboration with UCL and a range of other organisations, John has undertaken pioneering work in the area of next-generation, digital contracting, also becoming known as ‘computable contracting’. John has a wealth of experience in computational modelling and information science, much of which was gained through his direct involvement in R&D projects, mainly in the fields of engineering science and manufacturing automation.
Francis Denton
Francis Denton is a Content Analyst at Bloomsbury Publishing plc, experienced in the management of XML content, databases and data migration for digital publishing within the Academic and Professional division. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of the West of England (UWE) and offers 3+ years of XML, XQuery & Database Management Skills.
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.
Gerrit Imsieke
Gerrit Imsieke is managing director at le-tex publishing services, a mid-size preprint services, data conversion, and content management software company in Leipzig, Germany. A physicist by training, he entered the field of scientific publishing during his graduate studies. He is responsible for XML technologies at le-tex.
He is a member of the NISO STS Standing Committee and of the XProc 3.1 working group.
Michael H Kay
Michael Kay spent the first 25 years of his career working in total obscurity on billion-dollar projects within the (then) UK computer manufacturer ICL. So he's well aware that most of the XML action occurs well out of the gaze of the internet public, and that the impact of a technology like XML or XSLT continues to grow long after it has lost its youthful sex appeal. Hopefully some of the people doing unseen mega-projects with XML are in the audience today.
He moved into the limelight when he was asked to take on the job of editing the W3C XSLT 2,0 specification in 2002, and then went on to set up Saxonica in 2004, imagining that this might be an enjoyable way to spend a few years before retirement. 20 years on, retirement is as far off as ever. When the W3C activity on XSLT and XPath closed down after completing XSLT 3.0 in 2017, he felt there was unfinished work to be done, and this led eventually to the creation of a Community Group to develop a 4.0 specification. That group has been highly active over the last year, and this talk will describe the current state of its specifications - which are very much work in progress, despite the fact that experimental implementations of new features appear regularly in new Saxon and BaseX releases.
Martin Kraetke
Martin Kraetke graduated as engineer for print production and is Lead Content Engineer at le-tex in Leipzig where he works on the transpect framework and the xerif typesetting system.
He teaches XML and XSLT at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences.
Astrea Kumaradas
Astrea has an MA in English Literature and has five years of experience working in academic publishing environments in London. She currently works as a Content Analyst at Bloomsbury Publishing, where she performs quality assurance on XML content and works with XPath and XQuery.
In her spare time, she enjoys reading, going to the theatre and playing the violin.
Deborah A Lapeyre
Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre (Debbie) is a Senior Consultant for Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in helping their clients toward publishing and documentation solutions through XML, XSLT, and Schematron. She works with Tommie Usdin as Secretariat and architects for JATS (ANSI NISO Z39.96-2019 Journal Article Tag Suite), BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite), and NISO STS (ANSI/NISO Z39.102-2017 Standards Tag Suite). She is on the organizing Committee for Balisage: The Markup Conference. Debbie has taught hands-on XML, XSLT, DTD and schema construction, and Schematron courses as well as numerous technical and business-level introductions to XML and JATS. She 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 an early 1980's proprietary generic markup system named “SAMANTHA”. Hobbies include pumpkin carving parties and many too many books.
David Maus
David Maus (dmaus.name) is Head of Research & Development at Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg. He is the lead developer and maintainer of SchXslt, an XSLT-based Schematron processor.
Ari Nordström
Ari 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.
Steven Pemberton
Steven Pemberton is a researcher, author, public speaker, and occasional broadcaster, affiliated with the CWI, the Dutch national research centre for mathematics and informatics. 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 continues to chair the XForms and ixml groups at W3C, and was until recently a member of the ODF (Open Document Format) technical committee. More details at http://www.cwi.nl/~steven
Liam Quin
Liam Quin (www.delightfulcomputing.com) was in charge of XML development at W3C and now runs an independent XML consulting and training business in Canada.
Adam Retter
Adam is the Director of Evolved Binary Ltd, a software, consultancy, and training company in the UK, and he is also a co-founder of eXist Solutions GmbH, a company in Germany that develops the TEIPublisher software. Adam is passionate about Open Source software and Open Technical Communities. Adam was an invited expert at the W3C for several XML standards, and sits on the board of several conferences. Adam had previously contributed to eXist-db for over 20 years, but has now created a fork called 'Elemental' to publish various improvements. He is a recognised expert in several computer programming languages, and has made contributions to over 50 Open Source projects. Adam has also published the reference book on eXist: an open source NoSQL database.
When not travelling, Adam can be found teaching at Fordham University, or snowboarding and hiking around the peaks of the Italian French border.
Andrew Sales
Andrew Sales is Chief Content Architect at Bloomsbury Publishing Group plc, working mainly for its academic and professional division.
Andrew has been working with XML in publishing and specializing in quality assurance since 2000. In that time, he has modelled, validated and manipulated a wide range of content, from automotive and legal to pharmacology, education, rare books, drama, screenplays and timber. He developed a commercial Java-based product, a precursor to ISO Schematron, as well as an implementation of that standard.
Since 2016 he has been Project Editor of ISO/IEC 19757-3 (Schematron), and has presented at XML Prague and XML London. As well as serving on the programme committee of those conferences, he is co-founder and co-organizer of Markup UK, a conference about XML and other markup languages.
Erik Siegel
Erik is a self-employed content engineer and XML specialist, working from the Netherlands. Most clients are from the publishing industry or involved in standardization.
Coming from a technical Background, Erik is deliberately looking for content and XML related projects on all levels: from the strategic use of standards to developing processing applications. Documenting and explaining difficult subjects, whether in prose or as a course, is something he likes to as an addition to all the technical work.
Amber Smiley
Amber Smiley is a native of Cleveland, OH, a two time entrepreneur before the age of 25, a published author, certified Agile Coach for businesses, and certified Life Coach for individuals.
After an early start in psychology at 17 and a personal journey through mental health, she returned to the field with a mission to reduce trauma through education and coaching. She focuses on helping people and organizations break harmful patterns and build healthier systems.
Businesses are now recognizing the link between healing toxic work cultures and achieving higher productivity and profitability. With a strong instinct for identifying operational weaknesses and understanding the impact of employee treatment, she pursued Agile Coaching to help companies adapt, evolve, and thrive.
Whether it’s a personal breakthrough or a business transformation, she’s helps guide the shift.
Sheila Thomson
Sheila Thomson is a software developer who has been working with XML technologies since the early 2000s, in domains such as online news and journal publishing, banking and manufacturing, for a variety of organisations but highlights include the BBC, Nature, Lexis Nexis and Sopra Steria. She has a BA(Hons) in Information Studies and Librarianship and an MSc in Computer Science and is honoured to have been a member of a team that won a Webby Award. She is based in London and, when not developing, sings in a local community choir, chauffeurs Basset Hounds for a charity and researches shoemakers in 18th century Glasgow (and other family history-related rabbit holes).
Norman Tovey-Walsh
Norm Tovey-Walsh joined Saxonica from MarkLogic in 2020, and took over from Michael Kay as CEO in October 2023. Norm has had a high profile in the XML community for many years (and SGML before that). He's best known for his work on DocBook and XProc, but has also been active in a number of other areas including long-term membership of the XSL working group (he was editor of the XDM specification), the XML Core Working Group, the W3C Technical Architecture Group, the initial specification work on JAXP, the Oasis/Apache catalog resolver, and specifications such as XML Base.
Norm is a member of the Balisage conference committee, and sometimes runs demo jams at various XML conferences.
B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML for prose documents. Ms. Usdin has been working with generic markup since 1985 and has been a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs “Balisage: The Markup Conference” and is a frequent speaker at JATS-Con, MarkupUK, and other conferences. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas, and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in academia, government, and industry. Projects include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor documentation; historical and archival materials, and text books. 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 member of the NISO STS Standing Committee and of the BITS Committee. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html
Christine Windeln
Christine Windeln holds a degree in publishing technology and currently works as a student intern at le-tex in Leipzig. She studied at Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, where she wrote her bachelor’s thesis on rendering PrintCSS with TeX.