Board – Domain Experts – Faculty

John Chelsom is CEO of Seven Informatics Ltd in the UK, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria (Canada), a Visiting Professor at the National University for Water and Environmental Engineering in Rivne, Ukraine and an Honorary Associate of the Senior Common Room at St Edmunds Hall, Oxford. He trained as an electrical engineer before gaining a PhD in artificial intelligence in medicine.  As Managing Director of CSW Group from 1993 to 2008, John was responsible for the implementation of XML workflow and production systems for many major organisations, including the British Medical Journal, Jaguar Cars and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. 

CSW later developed Case Notes – an electronic health records product, using XML and other open standards. In 2003 the UK government chose Case Notes as the primary clinical system in a national architecture for a shared electronic health record covering the 55 million citizens in England.

Since 2010 he has been the lead architect of the open source cityEHR product – an XRX (Xforms, REST, XQuery) health records system currently used in a number of hospitals in England and for Telemedicine data integration in Ukraine.

In 2000, John founded the XML Summer School and continues as a board member and lecturer in this annual event.

John teaches on the Hands-on Introduction to XML.

Naveed Dogar completed her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Informatics at St. George’s Medical School where the focus of her dissertation was on Biometrics. She then went on to complete her Masters in Health Informatics at City University, London. The topic of her Masters dissertation was ‘Clinician-led Development of an Open Source EHR’, whereby a simple spreadsheet was used as a tool for clinicians to design and deploy their own enterprise-scale health records systems. After graduating, she continued her final project in collaboration with staff at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, to deliver an EHR for the clubfoot clinic. She has worked as a clinical analyst on projects implementing open source EHR systems at Nottingham University Hospital and at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford. 

Naveed also teaches on the Applied Healthcare Informatics Program for Fordham University NY. Naveed is currently undertaking a DPhil at the University of Oxford, where her work focuses on the internationalisation of open source EHRs, combining her research studies with being a mother to two young boys. Her aspirations are to increase access to basic healthcare needs in developing countries.

Adam has been the Director of Evolved Binary Ltd since 2014, where they specialise in software, consultancy, and training in information storage and retrieval. Their customers include large governmental organisations, publishers, universities, and one of the worlds largest social media companies. Adam also co-founded eXist Solutions GmbH, a software consultancy company in Germany. Adam has been instrumental in the development of the eXist-db Open Source Native XML Database since 2005, and has led its development since 2017.  In 2024 Adam forked eXist-db, to create Elemental, an advanced replacement for eXist-db. eXist-db is used as the base for the cityEHR Open Source Electronic Health Records software. Recently, in 2024, Adam was appointed as a professor on the Applied Health Informatics program at Fordham University.

He is passionate about Open Source software, standards, and open technical communities, and is an invited expert on several international standards groups. Additionally Adam serves on board of several international conferences specialising in information markup. He is a recognised expert in several computer programming languages, and estimates that he has made contributions to over 50 Open Source projects. He has also published the reference book on eXist-db with O’Reilly and several papers that advanced the state of the art in information retrieval in the publishing and digital humanities domains.

When not travelling, Adam can be found snowboarding or hiking around the peaks on the Italian French border where he resides.

Adam is track chair and teaches on the Applied XML Technologies. 

Jennifer Ramirez holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in Health Information Science and specializes in scientific publishing, health technology, and structured content. Based in Germany, she is an XML/XSL Software Developer, working with open-source publishing pipelines for scientific and medical research using XML, XSLT, and related open technologies.

Before moving into scientific publishing, Jennifer contributed to healthcare integration projects internationally, including supporting the implementation of an EHR system at Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, and conducting epidemiological data analysis for patient health initiatives at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. She continues to be passionate about healthcare interoperability and has worked with standards such as ISO 13606 and HL7 CDA, as well as XML-based documentation and open-source projects including cityEHR.

When she’s not immersed in XML, Jennifer enjoys puzzle competitions, learning new languages, and painting.

Gary Cornelius is a healthcare solutions specialist, technology consultant, and long-standing XML Summer School tutor with more than twenty-five years’ experience across software development, product engineering, and technical consultancy. His work has covered healthcare, media, government, retail, banking, professional services, and connected-device systems.Gary has taught practical XML courses at the XML Summer School for almost twenty years. His teaching is clear, supportive, and hands-on, helping participants build confidence as well as technical understanding. His sessions combine structured explanation, practical exercises, and careful guidance, so attendees can develop skills they can apply beyond the classroom.

Gary’s areas of expertise include XML technologies, document processing, information architecture, systems integration, Internet of Things, device HCI, networked services, embedded systems, electronic health records, and user-centred design. 

Gary teaches on the Hands-on Introduction to XML. 

Anthony Coates is a physicist who, via an interest in literate programming, became Leader of XML Architecture and Design for Reuters in the UK in 2000.  Since leaving Reuters, he has worked for various banks as an XML consultant and data architect.  Tony has participated in the development of a number of XML standards for banking and finance, including ISO 20022 and FpML (Financial Products Markup Language), and he also designed the OASIS genericode XML format for code lists, as used by both OASIS UBL (Universal Business Language) and FpML.

Steven Pemberton is a distinguished researcher in the fields of interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies, based at the Dutch national research centre CWI in Amsterdam. His university tutor was Dick Grimsdale, who built the world’s first transistorised computer, and who was himself a tutee of Alan Turing, ‘the father of AI’. After university, Pemberton — coincidentally — worked in Turing’s old department on the 5th computer in the line of computers Turing had worked on.

He co-designed the ABC programming language language that Python is based on, was the first user of the open internet in Europe when the CWI set it up in 1988, and has been involved with the web from its inception, co-designing several web standards, including HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, and RDFa. He now chairs the XForms and ixml groups at W3C. In 2022 he received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award, and in 2023 was named an ACM Distinguished Speaker. More details at http://www.cwi.nl/~steven

Ari Nordström is an independent content architect and SGML/XML expert with 30+ years of experience in single-source document management, migration and publishing, encompassing most XML standards in use today, from schema languages such as DITA, ATA and S1000D to technologies such as XSLT, XQuery, and XProc. He has provided solutions to many organisations and companies across a number of borders over the years, some of which deliver the rule of law, help dairy farmers make a living, and assist in servicing commercial aircraft. He is a frequent speaker at markup conferences and is founding member of the Markup UK Organising Committee.

Ari is the proud owner and head projectionist of Western Sweden’s last functioning 35/70mm cinema, situated in his garage, which should explain why he once wrote a paper on automating commercial cinemas using XML.

Geert is an information architect with 30 years of experience solving complex challenges for customers.
He works with structured data technologies such as XML and Linked Data, and has delivered successful projects in content migration, content management, and electronic publishing.
His expertise lies in designing foundational information architectures and models, particularly for technical documentation, legislative publishing, and the insurance industry.
Geert is also an active member of the markup technologies community, contributing to standards development and serving as a founding member of the Markup UK conference organizing committee.

Dr O’Neil Delpratt works for Saxonica who are the Developers of the Saxon processor for XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema, including the only XSLT 3.0 conformant toolset. He is a co-developer of the Saxon product, with specific responsibility for Saxon on .NET, and the C/C++, PHP and Python product SaxonC.

Before joining Saxonica, he completed his post-graduate studies at the University of Leicester. His thesis title was “In-memory Representations of XML documents” which coincided with a C++ software development of a memory efficient DOM implementation, called Succinct DOM. O’Neil regularly publishes and presents papers at various XML conferences, and was an invited expert on the W3C XQuery Working Group.

In his leisure time, O’Neil enjoys performing with the prestigious EAGA Gospel Choir, known for its exceptional musical artistry and vibrant performances.

Rob Walpole is a Software Engineer and Data Architect with over twenty years’ experience of delivering critical, data-intensive applications for well-known government and business clients, including The Met Office, The National Archives, HMRC, British Airways and Rolls Royce.

Rob began his career as a Helpdesk Analyst at British Telecom, then transitioned to web development before specialising in Java, and later, Scala programming. He has been working with XML technologies and standards since 2006, when he first attended the XML Summer School as a student. In 2012 he pioneered the use of Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies at The Met Office to create an innovative public data service.

Rob’s expertise was later crucial to developing a Linked Data catalogue for digital records at The National Archives. Throughout his career, he has consistently championed projects that prioritise open standards and open-source principles. He has also shared his knowledge through papers presented at conferences such as XML Prague, Markup UK and the European Semantic Web Conference.

In his free time, Rob enjoys working on his Personal Knowledge Graph and exploring the hundreds of miles of coast path near his home in Cornwall.

Sheila Thomson is a software developer who has been working with XML technologies since the early 2000s, in domains such as online news and journal publishing, banking and manufacturing, for a variety of organisations but highlights include the BBC, Nature, Lexis Nexis and Sopra Steria. She has a BA(Hons) in Information Studies and Librarianship and an MSc in Computer Science and is honoured to have been a member of a team that won a Webby Award. She is based in London and, when not developing, sings in a local community choir, chauffeurs Basset Hounds for a charity and researches shoemakers in 18th century Glasgow (and other family history-related rabbit holes).

Tom has been working with XML, XSLT, XQuery and related technologies, particularly in the field of digital publishing, quality analysis, and transformation since 2008. He has given training courses to various institutions including publishers, universities and the UN, as well as being a regular faculty member at the prestigious XML Summer School in Oxford.

Originally from Wales, Tom now lives with his family in Yorkshire.  He currently works for the Oxford University Press.

Wolfgang Schindler is a computational linguist with more than three decades of experience in data modelling as well as SGML/XML technologies, specifically in the publishing sector. At PONS Langenscheidt GmbH, a renowned international dictionary publisher, he designed a comprehensive XML-based editorial and production workflow. This workflow leverages a print-XML format for typesetting, which makes it possible to automatically reconvert finalized data back to editorial XML—an approach known as roundtripping. Additionally, Wolfgang developed a suite of tools for dictionary editors, primarily in XSLT and XQuery, and defined the company’s data models using XML Schema. He has also managed the transformation of diverse datasets (including third party content such as Duden products) for native applications and the Web portals of PONS and Langenscheidt and took part in front end development.

He is passionate about fostering international standards and well-structured, consistent data. Wolfgang is a co-author of the EPUB Dictionaries and Glossaries specification (https://idpf.org/epub/dict/ ) of IDPF. He brings in his expertise at W3C as Chair of the W3C Publishing Community Group and member of the Publishing Business Group.