Patrick Durusau, patrick@durusau.net

Consulting

Consulting work is accepted in the following areas:

• Advising on technology (cutting through the fog of marketing)
• Application of topic maps and related technologies
• Development of custom markup systems
• Grant applications (technology sections)
• Representation in standards organizations
• Standards development
• Technology Project/proposal reviews and development

Over the years I have seen any number of projects fail to reach their potential due primarily to a lack of local expertise to see through the hype of marketing.

For example, I have seen Oracle suggested as the database system for projects with less than 50,000 records. Oracle database are more than adequate for the job, by several orders of magnitude, but also require highly skilled staff to setup and maintain them. Is that really where a project should be spending its funds, when cheaper and as reliable alternatives are available?

Or projects that have re-invented the wheel, saying their requirements are unique. Perhaps no one has ever thought to call a paragraph an "extended discourse segment" before but that hardly requires re-inventing existing markup systems to accomodate that naming system.

I don't market or license software and so have no interest in what software a project uses, so long as it achieves the goals of the project. I recommend the best software available, whether commercial, shareware or free, based upon the project's requirements and the skills of its participants.