Presenter Details

Amanda Bucklow has been an inventive user of technology in engaging the client and the customer in developing business and managing risks for over 20 years. She has developed a unique and well refined blend of risk assessment, psychology and dispute resolution to engage all parties in the design of effective communication strategies.  
Information management and presentation is a key tool but frequently the cause of delays, disputes and disappointment. Significant successes include the redrafting and presentation of the Rule Book for Rail Safety and Standards Board, a national online booking system for maintenance planning, accident and incident reporting systems to improve data quality, strategic business development, branding and negotiation training programmes for insurers, law firms, local authorities and many others. Each application follows similar principles but each looks very different!

Amanda is a recognised leader in her field on professional competence.  
In 2006, she completed the first ever research project on strengths, attributes and behaviours of effective dispute resolution specialists.  
This research lead to new insights into what motivates people to perform well and how you engage people in what needs to be done.

Stephen Buxton is Director of Product Management at Mark Logic Corporation, provider of the industry’s leading XML content platform. Stephen works with Mark Logic’s publishing customers, including Elsevier, Oxford University Press, and O’Reilly, to drive the creation and use of content applications, the next generation of business applications.  Stephen is a member of the W3C XQuery Working Group and a founder/member of the XQuery Full-Text Task Force. Stephen has written a number of papers and articles on XQuery and Full-Text Search as well as the new content applications being driven by these technologies. Stephen is the co-author (with Jim Melton) of "Querying XML -- XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in context", from Morgan-Kaufmann.  Before joining Mark Logic Corporation, Stephen spent 14 years at Oracle, most recently as Director of Product Management for Text and XML.

Charles Cooper is Vice President of The Rockley Group, Inc. He has over 10 years' experience in user experience, help systems, taxonomy, and workflow design. He has facilitated sessions in these areas and evaluated existing materials.

He has assisted companies by analyzing their current help systems, web and intranet sites, identified areas of improvement, designed user interfaces, designed and conducted usability tests, developed taxonomies and metadata, and designed effective workflow.

Wez Dowell is the Director of EMEA for XyEnterprise Limited, the company has three main product ranges, XPP ( XML Professional Publisher), Contenta CMS and ContentaView our Interactive Electronic Technical Manual. Wez has been with XyEnterprise for 8 years and has been involved in the delivery of publishing solutions to many organisations over that time.  Before XyEnterprise Wez worked within the CADCAM CAE market, providing Solutions based on the CATIA product from Dassault Systems, where he gained a good understanding of Product data management which provided a great background for Publishing & Content Management.

Mr. Gafford combines a background in teaching and education with XML-based standards that has resulted in innovative ideas for e-learning content management and data interoperability. For the last three years, Mr. Gafford has lead subcommittees, studies and prototype projects that explore how learning content can benefit from structured markup. Results have lead to an increased awareness that standardized metadata and XML structure can unify diverse, but related content that support common systems, procedures and products. Mr. Gafford has taken his research to the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative where he is now the Deputy Director of the Job Performance Technology Center. He is a member of the DITA and S1000D learning subcommittees, is an active public speaker at S1000D and ADL events, and is a supporter of developing XML schemas that model instructional development and learning content to improve knowledge management and distributed learning.

Joe Gelb is the founder and president of Suite Solutions. Joe has overseen the successful implementation of documentation conversion, single-source publishing and content management integration projects. He has designed and built numerous utilities and applications to aid in the development, management, localization and multi-purpose publishing of technical documentation. He has broad experience in topic-oriented content development, information architecture, and application of tools for successfully optimizing creation, management, localization and delivery of technical information. Joe has developed innovative strategies for information modeling designed specifically for technical documentation and training.

After serving as CTO of Live Linx, overseeing technology design, development and content management implementation for over 10 years, Joe established Suite Solutions. The firm is based on Joe’s belief that every organization deserves responsive and professional service, independent of software vendors. His customer-oriented approach results in pragmatic process and technology solutions that meet requirements, are based on accepted standards and best practices, and make good business sense.

Mark Gross, founder of Data Conversion Laboratory, is a recognized authority on automated data conversion. As President, Mark not only fills the traditional CEO role, he also serves as Project Executive, with overall responsibility for resource management and planning.      
Prior to founding DCL in 1981, Mark was with the consulting practice of Arthur Young & Co. He has also taught at the New York University Graduate School of Business, the New School, and Pace University. Mark has an Engineering degree from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of automated conversions to XML and SGML, and was a member of the SGML mathematics committee.

JoAnn Hackos is President of Comtech Services, a content-management and information-design firm based in Denver, Colorado, which she founded in 1978. She is Director of the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM), a membership organization focused on content-management and information-development best practices. Dr. Hackos and colleagues are called upon by corporate executives worldwide to consult on strategies for content management, development and organizational management, product interface design, customer studies, web and traditional information architecture, and tools and technology selection.

For more than 25 years, Dr. Hackos has addressed audiences internationally on subjects ranging from content management, project management, effective interfaces and information, minimal information products, usability testing, and online and web-based information, to managing the information design and development process. Her workshops are dedicated to enhancing the practices and products that will best promote customer satisfaction.

John Hunt is DITA Architect and Learning Design Strategist in the Lotus Information Development Center at IBM and Chair of the OASIS DITA learning and training content sub-committee.  John fosters the adoption of structured, intent-based design and authoring of learning content with good instructional design and learning architecture. In his over 20 years of experience in user assistance and information development, John has designed award-winning help systems and spearheaded his team's adoption of DITA XML and a topic-based information architecture. John is a member of the core team responsible for DITA at IBM and a member of the DITA OASIS Technical Committee.

Gunnar is the Specification Manager of Qimonda AG since 2002 responsible for all technical customer documentation where he introduced XML technologies within 6 months. After graduating from University of Erlangen with Diploma in Electrical Engineering in 1995 he worked as engineer in DRAM R&D within the areas of design, design-for-testability and test including knowledge transfer, training and project documentation located in the US and Germany. He is a member of VDE and Tekom, the German associations for EE and documentation. Aside from optimizing and reengineering he likes Irish folk and plays the fiddle.

Peter Li is a Principal Specialist for Arbortext Solutions at PTC working in the Northern European region.  Since joining the company in 2005, Mr. Li has been responsible for helping clients to realise business benefits through the use of innovative solutions utilising XML based technologies.  Mr. Li has nearly 20 years of experience in key roles within document centric industries. Starting with a career in document conversion, he moved to running document capture organisations and then to document/content management solutions.  He has broad experience in a number of vertical markets, such as finance, legal and life sciences.

Maria Luisa MacDonald is a graduate in Modern Languages from the University of Bologna, Italy. She has worked at AgustaWestland since 1982. In 1992, she was invited to join AgustaWestland’s Technical Publications Department as a Technical Translator and Interpreter and in support of the Simplified Technical English Training Programme. In May 2000, Maria was appointed the AgustaWestland STE Tutor and the STE National Coordinator. She is a member of the ASD STE Maintenance Group.

Michael Miller is Vice President of Antenna House, Inc., a company that has developed one of the leading XSL-FO software products on the market today. Michael has a degree in Printing Engineering and Management and has been involved in high-end composition, document formatting, and document management for over 30 years. He has an extensive background with structured data, including; SGML, XML, S1000D, and DITA. During his career he has worked in Europe and North America, and has been involved in the implementations of some of the largest fully-automated publishing and document formatting projects.

Richard Nicholson is the PTC Product Manager for S1000D delivery applications based in Preston, UK where he applies his 10 years experience in the industry to maximising the end-user experience of XML. His experience ranges from being a content creator where he experienced the daily challenges of mastering the move to SGML and then XML authoring environments through to the development of content editor applications and the transformation of legacy data to XML. For the last 18 months he has applied his domain knowledge to the development of XML content management, publishing and interactive

Vince Savard is a Solution Architect for Arbortext Solutions at PTC. Since joining the company in 1997, Vince has played a major role in establishing Arbortext’s European operations. Working with both European industry leaders and regulators, he has helped Arbortext become the recognized market leader in the application of XML and enterprise publishing to the pharmaceutical industry. 

Vince has 17 years of experience in publishing technology. Starting with a career as an aerospace technical writer, he moved from deploying and applying solutions for technical publishing to applying the same standards based approach to a variety of industries ranging from discrete manufacturing to publishing and life sciences.  Vince holds a diploma in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary Canada.

Larissa Sliwinski is the Knowledge Architect at Business Objects, an SAP company, and is based in Paris, France. She has hands-on experience with DITA, from the early stages of planning a content management strategy, through the various stages of migration and adoption.  Larissa delivered a presentation entitled “Real-World DITA” at the 2007 STC Summit in Minneapolis.

Amber Swope is a Principal Consultant at JustSystems, where she applies her information architecture and DITA experience to help clients address their business challenges. An experienced information architect with almost 20 years in the information development field, Amber has supported teams through the full information development lifecycle. Her experience includes architecting and developing information for companies of various sizes, as well as managing teams and projects. At IBM, she led the first HTML to DITA migration project for the Rational division and implemented DITA in a production environment. Amber is also a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.

Noz Urbina is Business Development Manager for Mekon Ltd, where he provides XML solutions consultancy services to global organisations and SMEs. With five years in mark-up technology, training and services, Noz’s expertise is brought into projects for requirements analysis and to address issues of human interface design. His main interest area is mastering "the magic nexus" where business goals, end-user sensitivities, and technology must all synergise. 
Previous to working with Mekon, Noz worked in the Blast XMetaL team as Partner Manager, facilitating the growth and cross-pollination of a pan-European partner network of Content Solutions and Tool providers, and has held a number of business development, technical services, and sales positions where he was able to develop his expertise in a cutting-edge, efficiency-driven, business context.

Jeroen was the former joint founder and CEO of X-Hive Corporation and following the company’s acquisition by EMC, is now General Manager of XML Solutions for EMC. Jeroen is a regular contributor to the W3C standards committees and is also a member of the S1000D TPSMG.

Judi Vernau is Director of Information Architecture Consultancy for Metataxis Ltd, a company she set up in 2002. Judi has worked in the area of information provision and development for over 30 years, focusing increasingly from the mid 1980s onwards on the structuring and delivery of electronic information, and from the mid 1990s on metadata and classification. After qualifying and practising as a librarian for 5 years, Judi moved into reference publishing, managing several large-scale bibliographic and biographical works in print, microfiche and CD-ROM, and later went on to produce electronic versions of The Independent newspaper for Reed-Elsevier and Nature magazine for Macmillan.

At TSO, Judi provided consultancy in information architecture to various government departments and commercial organizations, including the Commission for Health Improvement, NHS Estates, the House of Lords and Rail Track, as well as devising a metadata schema for TSO itself. At Metataxis her client work has included enterprise information architecture, information architecture for websites, taxonomy development, metadata schema design, and the creation of business classification schemes. Recent clients include Inter-IKEA Systems bv, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, HBOS Treasury Services, Northamptonshire County Council, the CBI, and the Department for International Development.’

Chris Wood is the Technology Manager for the Customer Information Services (CIS) Team within the Customer Solutions & Support Group of BAE Systems.

Chris was a member of the AECMA (European Aerospace) Technical Publications Management Group for 3 years and before that a member of the AECMA Electronic Publications Working Group for 3 years.

In his role as Technology Manager, he is required to develop strategic solutions – trilogiView being an example - in the field of Customer Information Management by evaluating current and emerging technologies to ensure that the Operational Teams within CIS are supported by appropriate technological solutions.

Chris has presented a series of papers to various Conferences within Europe over the past 5 years. He has over 12 years experience as a Technical Author and managed a large Publishing and Printing Group within BAE Systems for 5 years before taking on the role of Technology Manager.