Patrick Durusau, patrick@durusau.netBackgroundAlthough a relative late-comer to the world of markup (cica 1990), I have spent the last fifteen years involved in a variety of markup projects. Most of my energies are focused on topic maps and related technologies both in ISO and OASIS. Still, I have found time to serve on the TEI Board of Directors and am the technical lead for the OSIS (a standard for encoding Bibles in XML) project. I am currently the chair of V1, the US National Body representative to ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34, the committee responsible for SGML, HyTime, DSDL and Topic Maps. I also serve as the chair of the Published Subjects TC at OASIS. I am currently working as an idependent consultant accepting clients in a variety of technology and markup related areas. Those include helping projects cut through the fog of marketing to choose appropriate solutions, development and application of topic map based solutions, as well as assisting standards development. See Consulting for further details. I am the former Director of Research and Development for the Society of Biblical Literature and was the director of the Society of Biblical Literature Font Foundation. In those roles at the Society of Biblical Literature I was part of initiating relationships with groups and organizations as diverse as the American Bible Society, the Freer Gallery (part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington) and Brigham Young University, among others. A great deal of that work was finding commonalities of interests that are furthered by institutional collaboration on a variety of projects. I originally became interested in markup due to the difficulty of representing cuneiform texts on a Commodore 128. I remain interested in the use of markup to enable both display and analysis of Ancient Near Eastern texts and languages. I was not always an academic, however. I was a solo law practioner in Louisiana for ten years, accepting cases that ran from separation and divorce to death penalty litigation. Having spend my entire legal career as a trial lawyer, I must confess a certain orientation towards obtaining results, as opposed to discussing results, planning results, etc., without taking concrete steps towards those results. |