Chairs
Each track is chaired by a world renowned expert in their field. Our subject chairs for the 2005 learning programme include:

John Chelsom
Chair - Information Modelling
John is Managing Director of CSW Group Ltd. He has been responsible for the design and development of XML information management systems for some of the world's most prestigious engineering, healthcare and publishing organisations. He is a regular speaker at XML conferences and was a contributing author for the original "SGML Buyer's Guide" (Prentice Hall, 1998).

Bob DuCharme
Chair - XSLT/XSL-FO
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 writes the "Transforming XML" column for XML.com and has contributed to XML Magazine, XML Journal, IBM developerWorks, and Prentice Hall's "XML Handbook". Bob is a consulting software engineer at LexisNexis.

Peter Flynn
Chair - Content and Knowledge Management
Peter is Manager of the Electronic Publishing Unit at University College Cork, Ireland, and also runs his own text management consultancy, Silmaril. He is editor of the XML FAQ and author of "The World-Wide Web Handbook" (ITCP, 1995) and "Understanding SGML and XML Tools" (Kluwer,1998). He was a member of the W3C's XML Special Interest Group, a member of the IETF's Working Group on HTML, and has been active in the Published Subjects and XML Office File Formats technical committees of OASIS.

Eve Maler
Chair - Web Services and Service Architectures
Eve Maler is a senior technical program manager at Sun Microsystems, leading engagements in identity and web services standards and specifications. Eve has made major leadership, technical, and marketing contributions to several successful standards, including OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL), WS-I Basic Security Profile, DocBook, and XML itself.

Tony Stewart
Chair - XML in News & Media
Tony Stewart is Director of Consulting at RivCom, a vendor-neutral organization that supplies XML and business process expertise to clients in the news and media industry, and Chair of the Technical Working Group of the AdsML Consortium, where he leads the team that is developing the AdsML suite of e-business standards. Tony is an experienced conference speaker with over 15 years' experience helping organisations improve their business processes and implement new technologies. Before joining RivCom he was Director of Internal Systems at a telecommunications provider, and Vice President for Software Development at a software development company. He began his career as a writer and filmmaker.

Ron Summers
Chair - XML in Healthcare
Ron is Professor of Information Science in the Research School of Informatics at Loughborough University where he is responsible for teaching and researching clinical knowledge management systems and health informatics. As a member of the Health Informatics Research Group (HIRG) at Loughborough, Ron is actively involved in initiating and carrying out world-class research in partnership with the healthcare community, from a local, national and international level of participation.

Lauren Wood
Chair - Trends & Transients in XML
Lauren Wood is a senior technical program manager for interoperability and technology partnerships at Sun Microsystems. She also chairs IDEAlliance's XML conference series in the US. Lauren has served on many technical and advisory committees, including W3C's Advisory Board (an elected position) and Advisory Committee, as well as chairing the W3C Document Object Model Working Group from its inception through to the successful publication of Level 2. She has worked as an independent consultant, is a published industry analyst, and was Director of Product Technology for SoftQuad Software.

Liora Alschuler
Speaker - XML in Healthcare
Liora Alschuler is a developer of XML-based standards for electronic healthcare information and a consultant in their application for providers and system vendors. She is a member of the HL7 Board of Directors and Co-chair, HL7 Structured Documents Technical Committee responsible for HL7's Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). Liora has written and presented worldwide on SGML, XML and healthcare information exchange. She is working on the development of the "Single Source" approach to re-use of clinical data for clinical trials and is the primary sub-contractor on two electronic health record projects for the National Library of Medicine.

Kal Ahmed
Speaker - Content and Knowledge Management
Kal Ahmed is co-founder of NetworkedPlanet, a company developing standards-based information management tools and solutions for the Microsoft .NET platform.He was one of the co-authors of the XML Topic Maps (XTM) specification and is currently editor of part of the ISO standard for Topic Maps, ISO 13250. Kal is a frequent speaker at XML conferences and has contributed to several books including Wrox Press's "Professional XML Meta Data" and Addison-Wesley's "XML Topic Maps". In the meagre spare time that all this affords, Kal heads development on the open-source Topic Map processing software, TM4J.

Tim Bray
Speaker - Trends & Transients in XML
Tim Bray managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo in 1987-1989, co-founded Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq:OTEX) in 1989, launched one of the first public web search engines in 1995, co-invented XML 1.0 and co-edited "Namespaces in XML" between 1996 and 1999, founded Antarctica Systems in 1999, and served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002-2004. Currently, he serves as Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, publishes a popular weblog (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/), and co-chairs the IETF AtomPub Working Group

Gary Cornelius
Speaker - Hands-on Introduction to XML
Gary Cornelius is a technical consultant at CSW Group Ltd. He began working in the publishing industry in 1992 as a student managing the production of a youth paper for the European Parliament. In 1993-1995 he completed an industrial apprenticeship based around digital imaging. In 1996-1999 Gary worked in IT on a number of large scale consumer publishing projects automating high quality PDF output from large databases and image repositories for Trader Media Group and various TV listings publications. In 2000-2003 he worked as a programmer at Future Publishing Plc in their Internet Services research department on a project to unify publishing processes using XML. Gary is also an active member of Oasis and participates in several standards committees and user groups.

Sean McGrath
Speaker - Trends & Transients in XML
Sean McGrath is Chief Technology Officer of Propylon. He is an internationally acknowledged authority on XML and related standards. Sean served as an invited expert the W3C's Expert Group that defined XML in 1998. He is the author of three books on markup languages published by Prentice Hall: XML Processing With Python, 1/e; XML By Example; and SGML for Software Developers. Sean also writes a weekly 'E-Business in the Enterprise' column for ITWorld and runs a technology blog at http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com

Tim McGrath
Speaker - Trends & Transients in XML
Tim McGrath is recognized as a leader in the introduction of Internet technologies to the EDI and e-commerce marketplace in Australia, specifically in the areas of international trade and transport. Tim was an active participant in the development of the ISO 15000 (ebXML) standards. He is also a co-author of "Professional ebXML Foundations" from Wrox Press. Since 2002 he has been the Chair of the Library Content subcommittee of the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) project as well as collaborating on a soon-to-be published book from MIT Press entitled "Document Engineering: Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services" with Bob Glushko of UC Berkeley.

Dave Nurse
Speaker - XML in Healthcare
Dave Nurse is Technical Director for CSW Group Ltd. Prior to working at CSW, Dave worked for the NHS as a biomedical scientist where he pioneered the move in healthcare towards web and XML-based solutions in information delivery and knowledge management. He specialises in the application of web technologies and XML in information management and has authored and contributed to numerous academic journals and conferences on this subject.

Dave Pawson
Speaker - Content and Knowledge Management
Speaker - XSLT/XSL-FO
David was introduced to XML via the XML-DEV list, when reviewing multi-media publishing for his present employer, the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB). Since joining the XSLT list at MulberryTech.com in 1998, he maintains the XSLT, XSL-FO FAQ on his website. David is author of O'Reilly’s book on XSL-FO. He is also a contributing member of the DAISY working group, which has provided a second generation digital talking book player targeted at blind and partially-sighted users.

Christian Ratenburg
Speaker - XML in News & Media
Christian Ratenburg trained as an electronics engineer with the Danish Airforce. He joined CCI Europe in 1984 as an assembler programmer on typesetting systems; spent a couple of years as systems engineer in sales; several years as product manager on news systems; then research analyst in strategic technology market research; specialized in archive and retrieval, wire systems, XML standardization, the Internet industry and broadcast technologies. Since 2004 he has specialized in advertising related business process integration and systems interfaces. Christian is also a member of the IFRA Information Processing Committee; the IPTC; and is a founding member and participant of the AdsML Technical Working Group.

Jeni Tennison
Speaker - XSLT/XSL-FO
Speaker - Information Modelling
Jeni Tennison is an Independent Consultant specialising in XSLT and XML schema development. 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 publishing, water monitoring and financial services. She is author of "XPath On The Edge" (Hungry Minds, 2001) and "XSLT" (Wrox, 2002) and one of the founders of the EXSLT initiative to standardise extensions to XSLT and XPath.

Kevin Wise
Speaker - Hands-on Introduction to XML
Kevin Wise is a Technical Consultant at CSW Group Ltd. He has been working with XML technologies since 1999, when he established their use for multimedia publishing within the University of Bath's Centre for the Development of New Technologies for Learning. He then spent several years working in the emerging interactive TV industry in New Zealand, where he was the architect for GadgetMill, an XML-based extensible authoring framework for iTV which uses XSLT for a range of purposes including code generation for a C API. Kevin has provided workshops on XML at the University of Bath and has spoken on the role of XML in Interactive TV at international iTV conferences in the USA and Australia. He has a PhD in multidimensional geometric modelling from the University of Bath.

Ian White
Speaker - XML in Healthcare
Ian White is the Regional Head of Programme (NPfIT) for the North East Cluster National Programme Office. Prior to this Ian worked for ten years in the NHS, as most notably the Head of Information for Doncaster & South Humber Healthcare NHS Trust. During this period, in addition to developing the Trust's Information services he was also responsible for developing and implementing an award winning Electronic Health Record service into Doncaster. During 2003 Ian's experience at Doncaster and South Humber NHS led him to perform the role of Programme Director for the South Yorkshire (SY) ENHANCE (EPR) Project, and then from July 2003 as Acting Chief Information Officer (CIO). In these two roles Ian has been responsible for promoting a SY collaborative approach to IT service development and delivery.