As we have an increasing amount of information available in electronic formats, we need a way of dealing with and managing the volume of data we store and exchange. To help us do this we can use meta data, which is simply data about data. XML's extensibility and interoperability make it an ideal format for meta data that is part of a scheme of sharing data between multiple sources. As concepts such as "the semantic web" and web services move closer to reality, a knowledge of meta data and how to use it will be of huge advantage.
There have been a number of recent developments in the field of XML meta data, and Professional XML Meta Data takes a look at some of the initiatives at the bleeding edge of the XML meta data world. In this book you will see how schemas, topic maps, RDF, and inferencing can be put to use in the field of data description, discovery, and exchange.
David Dodds has been writing code and teaching computing science at University for a while. He has been working the last few years on the various emerging XML technologies and has been on the W3C SVG workgroup to develop the specification for SVG 1.0; and on the early committee to develop XML Topic Map specification. David has published numerous papers in robotics and in fuzzy systems. He works on systems of representation, designing UKL Unified Knowledge Language, and pursues designs of systems of meta data and meta-programming representation.
Andrew Watt is an independent consultant. He has focused on the power of Web-relevant technologies including Lotus Domino, Java and HTML. His current interest is in the various applications of the Extensible Markup Meta Language, XMML, sometimes imprecisely and misleadingly called XML. The present glimpse he has of the future of SVG, XSL-FO, XSLT, CSS, XLink, XPointer etc when they actually work properly together is an exciting, if daunting, prospect. He has just begun to dabble with XQuery.
Mark Birbeck is Technical Director of Parliamentary Communications Ltd. where he has been responsible for the design and build of their political portal, ePolitix.com. He is also managing director of XML consultancy x-port.net Ltd., responsible for the publishing system behind spiked-online.com. Although involved in XML for a number of years, his special interests lie in metadata, and in particular the use of RDF.
Jay Cousins is an Analyst/Consultant at RivCom, a consultancy specialising in helping businesses adopt XML technologies for the creation, management and distribution of information. Jay works in information analysis and modeling, specializing in the development of NewsML and XML based architectures.
Daniel Rivers-Moore is Director of New Technologies at RivCom, a UK-based consultancy specializing in helping companies and organizations adopt leading-edge technologies for information management and delivery. Daniel was actively involved from the outset in the development of XML and its related technologies. He has served as Joint Project Leader of the STEP/SGML Harmonization initiative for bringing together technical documents with engineering data, and is editor of NewsML, the XML-based standard for the management and delivery of multimedia news.
Dr Robert Worden is a consultant with Charteris plc in London, specialising in project management and large-scale data architectures. Previous to this he worked for Logica, building relational database management system and expert systems for medical diagnosis, going on to managing Logica's advanced research centre at Cambridge.
Danny Ayers is a network consultant and freelance author, generally occupied with Java and web-related tasks.
Kal Ahmed is a founder member of TopicMaps.Org and a contributor to the XTM 1.0 specification.
Josh Lubell works at US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where he applies markup technology towards solving data exchange problems between manufacturing applications. He is a contributor to various standards efforts and speaks regularly at XML-related conferences.
