Frank Gilbane is president of Bluebill Advisors, Inc., a firm that works closely with software companies and their investors, advising them on all aspects of building and running a successful software business. Bluebill Advisors also publishes the Gilbane Report. In addition, Frank serves on the board of directors of Hughes.net, an ISP and ICANN accredited domain name registrar in southern California.

Before founding Bluebill Advisors Frank was with CAP Ventures, was founder of Publishing Technology Management, Inc., co-founder of the French firm TechnoForum SARL, and co-founder of the Documation conferences.

He is a member of the MIT Enterprise Forum, the Advisory Board of the MIT Press journal Markup Languages: Theory & Practice, a past member of the Board of Advisors to SGML Open (now OASIS), and a recipient of the GCA's TechDoc award. He has a BA from Boston University and an MA from Tufts University in Philosophy.

Dr. Nic Fulton is the Chief Technology Strategist for Reuterspace, a division of Reuters focusing on B2B and B2C initiatives. Nic has worked for Reuters in a number of locations, and most recently headed up XML Architecture and Design for the company. In this role Nic played a major part in Reuters involvement with the W3C as XML was developing and coordinated Reuters involvement in standards consortia including FpML, NewsML, IRML and XBRL. Nic has also been a long term member of Reuters core Research and Standards group in which he acted as an internal consultant to many key Internet projects. Nic has a PhD in Quantum Physics and lives and works in New York with his astrophysicist wife.

Adam's talk will discuss the architecture required for deploying services and the role XML plays in this architecture. A key focus will be the challenges of discovering services, looking up who provides services, actually interacting with services, and integrating services.

Adam built 31 MIS systems for Citicorp from 1977-1980 which let to a change from losing $300MM a year to earning $300MM a year. He built Funds Transfer systems and ran the Funds transfer business for the 12th largest bank in the US in 1981-1982. He started a company Analytica in 1983 which was sold to Borland in 1985. He built Quattro (a leading spreadsheet at the time) for Borland from 1986 to 1988.

In 1989 Adam joined Microsoft and built and managed Access, the database component of Microsoft Office from 1990-1992. In 1993-1995 he built core shared technology for Microsoft and in 1996 built the team that built IE 4.0 and much of Microsoft's other Internet technologies. In 1997-1999, he coordinated an industry wide effort to build an Internet B2B standard known as XML and drove all Microsoft efforts in this arena including all Internet and Database access components and architecture.

He was managing 170 people when he left Microsoft to form Crossgain.

Yuri: The Video

Six months before the formation of the original XML Working Group, in January 1996, Yuri Rubinsky passed away, but his vision and spirit and the many projects he initiated, from the Dublin Core to OASIS to what has been called "the first XML Web browser", continue to animate our industry. This short video, based on journals, writings, and interviews, looks at the world of structured information BXML--Before XML--through the eyes of this articulate, passionate, and charismatic evangelist. It looks at the impact that this one man had on an industry.

Ron Shelby is XMLSolutions' Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The former Chief Information Officer (CIO) of e-GM, he headed General Motor's web development and the global rollout of GM BuyPower, their award-winning vehicle shopping site. Before that, as GM's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), he led the strategy of using XML for system-to-system integration. Prior to General Motors, Mr. Shelby was American Express Corporation's Vice President of Data Warehousing, and he directed implementation of a global data warehousing environment for their U.S. and European business units. He has also been a technology leader at Connecticut Mutual, where he directed the implementation of its "One Image" database environment and managed information systems development for their investment and finance areas. Mr. Shelby was a member of the International Standards Committee (X3H4) on database languages that created the SQL programming standards. Shelby was President of the DAMA International Board of Directors, President of the Information Management Association of Canada, and founded their Washington, DC Chapter. He has a BA from Wabash College and a MAT from Indiana University.

Simon Nicholson is the XML Market Strategist at Sun Microsystems where he is a member of the team responsible for the development of strategy, promotion, and application of XML within the Sun platforms. Simon is co-lead of the Marketing and Awareness Project Team at ebXML, serves on the Advisory Committee for XML.ORG and served as Chair of the OASIS Board of Directors.

XML offers an opportunity to unify how structured and semi-structured data is queried, updated, and stored. This has prompted a large industry focus on XML and its relevance to relational databases. A central unification point for academic and commercial research is in the W3C Schema and Query groups. In addition to the standards-based activities, several companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Software AG, and others are innovating at the product level, providing developers with a unified view of relational and XML data. At this keynote presentation, David Turner overviews where we are today, and what things might look like tomorrow. He provides details on Microsoft's plans in the middle-tier and server, and the role Microsoft is playing in the XML and database standardization efforts.

David Turner is the Product Manager and Technical Evangelist for XML technologies at Microsoft. He is responsible for promoting adoption of XML within the development community. Before working at Microsoft, David was responsible for shipping SGML and HTML authoring products and Internet development tools. He has been working with XML and structured information for over seven years. He is currently Microsoft's representative to the W3C Advisory Committee and is also Microsoft's representative to OASIS. David has a degree in Engineering Science from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Mark Colan is an XML Evangelist and Technologist for IBM Corporation. He is also well known as the Lead Architect for the InfoBus Technology (a Java Standard Extension). Mark currently gives presentations on IBM's XML technologies and strategy. With over 24 years experience in designing and implementing commercial software products and technologies, Mark is well versed in component software strategies, operating systems, and software tools. He has spoken at several leading Java and XML industry conferences and events, including JavaOne '98 and '99, the Java Developer's Kitchen series in 1998, the Colorado Software Summit in 1998, XML '99, XTech 2000, COMMON Spring 2000, SD/West 2000, and the O'Reilly Java Enterprise 2000 conference. He has worked for IBM and Lotus since 1984. Mark holds a degree in Computer Science from the Department of Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

XML Schemas: Best Practices

Roger Costello,
Senior Software Engineer, The MITRE Corporation

XML Schemas is an exciting new technology with lots of power. It's big ... and powerful ... and new ... and without a large experience base. With anything new it is often difficult to know how to get started, especially when there are no guidelines to show the way. The purpose of the Best Practices discussions is to collectively create a set of schema design guidelines that describes the pros and cons of each design issue, this enabling a schema designer to make intelligent design decisions in creating a schema. The objective of the Best Practices guidelines is not to dictate rules, "thou shall follow these rules", but rather, to shed light on all sides of each design issue, so that a schema designer is empowered to make intelligent design decisions.

For the past three years Roger Costello has been deeply involved with XML technology. As a result of his involvement, he has created a course that covers the full spectrum of the XML suite of technologies including XML/DTDs, XSLT/XPath, SAX/DOM, XLink/XPointer, and XML Schemas. Roger has been to all parts of the world giving his XML course. He is a member of the XML Schema working group. He also does a lot of development in Java. Mr. Costello has a Ph.D in Computer Science from Ohio State University.

Closing Keynote -
Friday, December 8 • 12:30pm - 1:00pm

Mary Fletcher Laplante,
Co-Founder and Partner, Fastwater, LLP