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Patrick Durusau, patrick@durusau.net

Background

  • I research and blog on a wide range of data science/data integration issues at Another Word For It.

  • OpenDocument Editor, OASIS TC (also Project Editor for ISO/IEC 26300)

    I am the editor of the OpenDocument Format standard (at OASIS).

  • Convener of JTC 1 SC 34/WG 3 Topic Maps

    I am the convener of the topic maps working group, which is part of SC 34. I am also a co-editor of 13250-1 Introduction and general principles (with Motomu Naito), 13250-5, Topic Maps Reference Model (with Steve Newcomb and Robert Barta), and TR 29111 RDF/topic maps (with Sam Oh).

  • Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Library of Information and Library Science, UIUC.

    I taught a summer course on topic maps at the library school at UIUC and am scheduled to offer that course again in the summer of 2009.

  • Former chair, V1, the US mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34.

  • Technical lead for the OSIS (a standard for encoding Bibles in XML) project.

    • 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.