Kal Ahmed, Principal Consultant, Ontopia

Kal Ahmed is Principal Consultant with Ontopia, a company dedicated to creating topic map software. He has been involved in structured information standards for 6 years as a developer and consultant. He is a member of the Topicmaps.Org Working Group which produced the XML Topic Maps (XTM) specification and has presented a number of papers relating to topic maps and their practical uses. Kal is also the developer and maintainer of TM4J, an open source topic map processor written in Java.

Dave Beckett, Technical Researcher, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol

David Beckett has worked as a Technical Researcher at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol since June 2000. His research interests include developing Internet technology for resource discovery based on metadata solutions such as the Dublin Core, RDF and XML with distributed web crawling. He previously held a research post at the University of Kent at Canterbury working on the Internet Parallel Computing Archive subject gateway and the UK Mirror Service project developing the RDF-based metadata management and resource discovery system.

Bryan Bell, President/Founder, Synth-Bank, LLC

Bryan Bell is president and founder of Synth-Bank, LLC. He was a pioneer in the convergence of the telecommunication and entertainment industries developing an on-line distribution system for intellectual property in 1979. His early work in multi-vendor hardware interface for music paved the way for the software standard today known as MIDI. Bryan's articles appear in numerous industry periodicals. Over the last 20 years, his clientele has included some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry. 1994-2000, Bryan has worked as the Strategic Technologist for the Frank Russell Company where he is responsible for long-term technology planning, vendor relationships, and advanced technology research.

Michel Biezunski, Co-Founder/CEO, InfoLoom, Inc.

Michel Biezunski, PhD, is an information technologies consultant, co-editor of the ISO 13250 Topic Maps standard, and co-chair of the XTM specification. He has created a curriculum for engineers on electronic engineering and was the founder and president of the SGML Users' Group France. He created a company, High Text, in 1992, and since 1998 has been working as an independent consultant. Mr. Biezunski designed and created the Topic Map Loom™ technology, a tool used to create and maintain easy-to-use topic maps.

Dr. Charles H. Bixler, Director of Knowledge Management, Keane Federal Systems, Inc.

Dr. Bixler is currently the Program Manager for Information Technology Support Services (ITSS) and Director for Knowledge Management at Keane Federal Systems, Inc., managing a major contract for the Department of Justice Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. He is an adjunct Professorial Lecturer at The George Washington University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Dr. Bixler is an active member of the Enterprise Knowledge Management Group (EKMG), assisting in the development of Knowledge Management Frameworks, Enterprise Architectures, and Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). He served in the United States Navy for over 23 years and performed the duties of Program Manager, Test Pilot, TOPGUN Instructor, and operational F-14 Fighter Pilot. He has flown 33 different types of high performance aircraft with over 4500 flight hours and 500 carrier landings. He has over 20 years of Program Management experience, encompassing many areas of research, development, and acquisition.

Ramon F. Brena, Professor, Center for Artificial Intelligence, ITESM, Mexico

Since 1990 full-time researcher at the Center for Artificial Intelligence, ITESM, Mexico (private university). Director of the Agent-based systems group at the Center for Artificial Intelligence. Head of the RICA project (Information and Knowledge Networks with Agents, in Spanish). Projects with industry for the development of Expert Systems (Cydsa industrial group). Conferences and publications in the Intelligent Agents area, as well as Automated Reasoning and Software Engineering. In 1989 full-time professor at the ITAM (private university). PhD degree in Informatics at the INPG (France, 1989), major in Artificial Intelligence.

Linda Burman, Vice President, Standards and Evangelism, Kinecta Corporation

Ms. Burman is a recognized XML industry expert who routinely speaks, chairs, tracks and delivers tutorials at the leading XML conferences, Seybold Seminars, Documation, and other industry events. Prior to joining Kinecta, Ms. Burman was president and CEO of L A Burman Associates, an XML consulting firm that provides strategic and tactical services to large publishers, software/hardware vendors, non-profit consortia (such as GCA and OASIS), and the investment community. Ms Burman is also founder and co-chair of the PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) Working Group; co-author of Mastering XML (Sybex 1999); a guest XML lecturer at the University of Toronto; and co-chair of the marketing committee for the ICE (Information Content and Exchange) Authoring Group. Linda's first role in the computer industry was as a systems engineer for Datapoint Corporation, the inventor of ARCnet, the first local area network. In 1988 she took a senior product marketing position at Bitstream, a digital font foundry. From there, Ms. Burman was recruited to work at Apple Computer as the publishing evangelist, where she was responsible for driving Apple's strategy with third-party publishing software developers. Directly prior to starting her own company, Ms. Burman was director of worldwide marketing at SoftQuad inc., a leading vendor of SGML, XML and HTML products. Ms. Burman holds an honors BA in Literature from the University of Toronto (cum laude) and a Masters in Education from Boston University (suma cum laude). She sits on the advisory councils of Foundry Ventures and the Daycare Program of the Baycrest Geriatric Hospital.

Bryan Caporlette, Executive VP of Strategic Technology, Sequoia Software

Bryan Caporlette, Sequoia Software's Executive Vice President of Strategic Technology, has more than 12 years of experience designing and implementing Internet publishing, electronic commerce and document management solutions for a variety of industries. A recognized expert in the development of SGML/XML-based products, Caporlette serves as Sequoia's lead XML evangelist, speaking at industry conferences and SGML/XML user groups here and abroad, contributing articles and white papers to various publications, and working with customers to explore the full potential of Sequoia's technology. Caporlette provides Sequoia with XML knowledge, as well as internal and external organizations with technology expertise on XPS(tm), Sequoia's XML-pure portal server. In addition, Caporlette oversees a research and development group that supports partner product integration and prototypes emerging XPS technology. He also has an active role in XML industry groups such as W3C and Oasis. Caporlette received a B.S. in Systems Analysis at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

Nick Carr, Founder and Managing Director, Allette Systems

Nick Carr is the Founder and Managing Director of Allette Systems, a 14-year-old systems integrator specializing in XML design, training and implementations based in Sydney, Australia. Allette Systems has a long history of implementations using standards-oriented markup languages for such organizations as the Australian Stock Exchange, Sun Microsystems, Singapore Attorney General's Chambers and many others. Nick Carr has been the Chairman of the Asia Pacific XML Conference for the past 7 years and has presented widely on the topic of XML at numerous international conferences.

Dan Connolly, XML Activity Leader, W3C

Dan Connolly is the leader of the XML Activity. He began contributing to the World Wide Web project, and in particular, the HTML specification, while developing hypertext production and delivery software in 1992. He presented a draft of HTML 2.0 at the first Web Conference in 1994 in Geneva, and served as editor until it became a Proposed Standard RFC in November 1995. He was the chair of the W3C Working Group that produced HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0, and collaborated with Jon Bosak to form the W3C XML Working Group and produce the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation. Dan received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. His research interest is investigating the value of formal descriptions of chaotic systems like the Web, especially in the consensus-building process.

Dr. Jeff Conklin, CogNexus

Dr. Jeffrey Conklin has over 15 years experience and an international reputation in the fields of hypertext and groupware research, plus professional experience as a facilitator, consultant, and teacher. Dr. Conklin is perhaps best known for his work with the Issue Based Information System (IBIS) method, such as designing research tools and commercial products that support IBIS. He developed the Visual Issue Mapping System (VIMS) facilitation technique, which allows groups to map their design and problem solving conversations in IBIS, and has taught this technique to hundreds of people. He has facilitated thousands of meetings, with such clients as the World Bank, the United Nations, the House of Representatives, the City of Washington, DC, and the General Services Administration (GSA). Dr. Conklin's research on collaborative and facilitation technologies has been published in numerous academic journals and conferences.

Scott Cooper, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Knowledge Management Business Unit , Lotus Development Corporation, a division of IBM

Scott Cooper is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Lotus' Knowledge Management Business Unit. He is responsible for the development of Lotus' suite of KM products including the Lotus Knowledge Discovery System, a suite of technologies designed to allow organizations to discover the contextual relationships between people and information. He also manages the Document Management, Workflow, Search, and SmartSuite teams.

He joined Lotus in 1992 as a Product Manager responsible for developing add-on technologies to the Lotus Notes Platform. During his career at Lotus he has focused on developing new products for emerging markets and has brought over a dozen new products to market. As General Manager of the Document Management business he launched Domino.Doc, a content management add-on for Domino that has achieved massive growth and a multi-million seat installed base. In 1997 he led the acquisition of Onestone technologies, a German workflow technology vendor and integrated their business into the Lotus knowledge management family.

He was also one of the principal strategists that conceived the current Lotus Knowledge Management vision and technology strategy. This marketplace represents one of Lotus' most significant growth opportunities.

Prior to joining Lotus, Mr. Cooper held various development and marketing positions at Eastman Kodak. He joined Kodak as an engineer working on advanced development of digital imaging applications. As Product Engineer, he was instrumental in developing and launching Eastman Kodak's first PC-based desktop imaging product. Mr. Cooper was also a founding member of a Kodak subsidiary that built the first add-on product for Lotus Notes.

Mr. Cooper speaks extensively at industry events, is an advisor to several Lotus business partners, and is a recognized leader in the Knowledge Management arena. Mr. Cooper holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Saint John Fisher College.

Ron Daniel Jr., Standards Architect, Interwoven

Ron Daniel Jr. is a Standards Architect at Interwoven, specializing in the areas of metadata and XML. He is one of the co-editors of the first two Dublin Core reports, was a member of the RDF committees, has edited several IETF RFCs, and is currently a co-editor of the W3C's XPointer specification. Dr. Daniel is currently the co-chair of the PRISM working group, which is defining a metadata specification for publishers. In his ample spare time, Ron has begun to refurbish vacuum tube stereo equipment that is even older than he is.

David Dodds, Senior Software Engineer, iKnowMed

David Dodds has designed and developed graphical interfaces and scientific and technical visualization systems at Northern Telecom, as well as text-understanding and expert systems, there. Prior to that, in university environments, he programmed a speech synthesis system, and designed and developed technical scientific models and simulations. Mr Dodds is the author of numerous papers on robotics, and is on the W3C SVG WG and Idealliance XTM committee as a founding participant.

Edd Dumbill, Managing Editor, XML.com

Edd Dumbill is Managing Editor of XML.com, part of the O'Reilly Network. He writes and speaks on the subjects of XML and the Web. He is also the creator of XMLhack.com, the popular XML developer news site, and WriteTheWeb.com, a web site focusing on the writeable, two-way, Web. Edd is also co-founder of Pharmalicensing.com, an online intellectual property exchange for the pharmaceutical industry.

Eric Freese, Director of Consulting Services-Midwest Region, ISOGEN International/DataChannel

Mr. Eric Freese is the Director of Consulting Services in the Midwest Region for Isogen International, a Datachannel company. Mr. Freese has more than a dozen years of experience in the area of information, document, and knowledge management. His specific expertise is in the development of SGML products and implementation of SGML technologies including XML, DSSSL, HyTime, Topic Maps, HTML and the WWW. This experience includes research, analysis, specification, design, development, testing, implementation, integration and management of database systems and computer technologies in business, education and government environments. Mr. Freese has developed and implemented training programs and materials from elementary to graduate level. He also has research experience in human interface design, graphics interface development and artificial intelligence. He is also a founding member of TopicMaps.org, the organization currently developing XTM, a topic map standard for the web.

Dr. Nic Fulton, Chief Technology Strategist, Reuterspace, a division of Reuters

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 has overseen Reuters involvement with W3C as XML has developed, 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 acts 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.

Carol Jean Godby, Senior Research Scientist, OCLC

Carol Jean Godby is a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC, where she currently manages a project on automatic document classification. During the past eleven years, she developed software for one of the largest digital library projects that pre-dated the Web, and for one of the first commercially successful systems that delivered technical scholarly material on the Web. She is finishing a Ph.D. in computational linguistics at The Ohio State University, is the author of numerous papers on lexical knowledge acquisition, and was a co-editor of the first Dublin Core Workshop report.

Marcus Goncalves, Chief Knowledge Officer, Virtual Access Networks, Inc.

As a Chief Knowledge Officer, Mr. Goncalves brings 12 years of IS/IT management and analysis to Virtual Access Networks. He has been a Senior IT/Enterprise application integration analyst for ARC Advisory Group and has held a variety of senior systems and technology management positions at companies such as RECOLL Management Corp (FDIC) and Process Software Corporation. He has also consulted for several major Internet and computing firms, including Sun Microsystems, CSX and Microsoft. Mr. Goncalves is the author of more than 20 books on Internet and Web technologies and security, translated into seven languages. He holds an M.S. in computer information systems from Southwest University.

Chris W. Higgins

Chris W. Higgins has a B.A and M.S. in International Relations from Florida State University and a J.D. from the University of Washington. He was one of the founding officers of TechnoTeacher Inc., worked as a Coordinator for International Relations for Chiba Prefecture in Japan, an IP associate for Lane, Powell, Spears, Lubersky LLP in Seattle, and currently is VP of Intellectual Property at ePremis Corporation. Since 1996, Chris has presented several papers at GCA's Annual Conferences on legal/technical issues of interest to the standards community.

G. Ken Holman, CTO, CraneSoftwrights, Inc.

Mr. G. Ken Holman is the Chief Technology Officer for Crane Softwrights Ltd., a Canadian corporation offering OmniMark programming, DSSSL and XSL/XSLT language training, and general SGML and XML related computer systems analysis services to international customers. Mr. Holman is the current Canadian chair of the ISO subcommittee responsible for the SGML family of standards, current chair of the OASIS XSLT Conformance Technical Subcommittee, an invited expert to the W3C, former chair of the OASIS XML Conformance Technical Subcommittee, the author of "Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath (XSL Transformations and the XML Path Language)" (ISBN 1-894049-06-3), and has often been a speaker at related conferences. Prior to establishing Crane, Mr. Holman spent over 13 years in a software development and consulting services company working in the NAPLPS and the SGML industries.

Cindy Hubert, KM Practice Area Manager, APQC, Custom Solutions

Cindy Hubert is a Senior Knowledge Management Consultant and leads the Knowledge Management Team for the American Productivity & Quality Center. Since joining the Center, Cindy has worked with a variety of industries, including oil and gas, manufacturing, health care, finance, retail, non-profit, and consumer products. Her focus is on business process improvement including knowledge management, quality, benchmarking, measurement, and strategic planning. Cindy is responsible for managing the KM Practice area and KM market development, delivering APQC education and training courses, training instructors, designing courseware and curricula, and designing, facilitating, and deploying knowledge management strategies and initiatives.

Dale Hunscher, CEO, South Wind Design, Inc.

Dale Hunscher has worked in the IT industry for 18 years, developing widely-used commercial products in the database connectivity arena for nine years as CEO of South Wind. For the last three years, in partnership with Connectex, LLC, he has consulted on the architecture of large scale XML-RDBMS and XML-OODBMS document management systems. South Wind's clients have included Pervasive Software Inc., Bell & Howell Information & Learning, and the Thomson Corporation.

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