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2 River Oak Road

Barrington

Rhode Island 02806

Phone (401) 245-0093

E-mail gtn@mind-to-mind.com

Gavin Thomas Nicol

Objectives

To be the internal and external technolgy evangelist for a company.

To participate in the strategic technological planning process.

To participate in WWW standards activities.

To invent and develop leading-edge, world-changing, technology.

 
Functional summary

Recognized world expert on WWW, WWW I18N, HTML and XML I18N, as well as XML and related standards.

Deep experience in information analysis, and information management system design.

Deep knowledge of the WWW and distributed programming in general.

Excellent communication and presentational skills.

Can program in most languages. More recently, JAVA/J2EE almost exclusively.

 
Employment
2000-2001 eBTI Corporation, Providence, RI Chief Scientist

Responsible for cross-team coordination of corporate technologies and architectures.

Responsible for strategic decision-making and advanced R&D regarding next-generation technical/product directions.

Responsible for corporate participation and representation in industry and national standards organizations.



2000-2001 Inso Corporation, Providence, RI Director, Applications Engineering

Managed a group of people that develops custom code for product deployments where speed of implementation, and robustness are crucial.

Work with the most important customers to design solutions to solve large-scale data management, or web delivery needs.

Designed the Engenda workflow and content management application. Implemented most of the key functional components.

Responsible for cross-team coordination of corporate technologies and architectures.

Responsible for strategic decision making regarding next-generation technical/product directions.



2000-2001 Inso Corporation, Providence, RI Senior Systems Architect

Designed the Jupiter Enterprise Information Management System. Worked with engineering department to develop prototypes and concrete interfaces.

Developed XML and related standards technologies to support high-performance dynamic delivery, platform independent UI definitions, mobile application interfaces.

Designed and helped prototype a scalable enterprise information management backbone.

Prototyped WebDAV integration using mod_dav and Apache.

Prototyped predictive caching by extending mod_cache in Apache.



2000-2001 Inso Corporation, Providence, RI Architect

Designed the DynaWeb 3.0 product.

Implemented the I18N features of the product, which are still second to none.

Participated in the design of various other products at an architectural level.



1994-1996 EBT, Providence, RI Director, Technical Support and Consultation

Established the Japanese EBT Office.

Established a chain of 4 distributors (NEC, Gakken, Toshiba, Toyo) and helped establish SGML expertise centers in each. The first 3 eventually had 10 or more people in their groups. Worked with top management at these companies to establish seminars and marketing plans.

Developed the DynaWeb Server, the world's first WWW server to support the stylesheet-driven, runtime conversion of SGML/XML to HTML. The product won awards from its inception.

Worked on the design of DynaText 3.0, especially at the architectural level.

Primary architect for DynaWeb 3.0.

Managed the transition of the EBT Japanese office to a fully-fledged Japanese operation, locally managed. Participated in the hiring of all Japanese staff, including the Japanese GM, and others at the director level.



1990-1994 NEC Scientific Information Systems, Tokyo, Japan Systems Engineer

Worked with researchers in the NEC Central Research Laboratory on the 'Hypermedia Workstation' project.

Object naming/messaging protocol research.

Research on distributed lexical scoping in programming languages (especially scheme).

Distributed hypermedia/collaborative-authoring environments. Especially systems with dynamic, distributed UI's, community memory, shared whiteboards, etc.

Distributed file system/persistent object store.

Extending the file system (NFS) to manage shared workspaces.

Multimedia extensions to X11, especially video and scheduling capabilities

Developed authoring tools for the above.

Developed Unix device drivers and ported X11R5 to the hypermedia workstation video board.

Developed an internal knowledge base using WWW and HTML.

Developed the first localized version of the Mosaic browser to support the above.

Evaluating new technologies such as CORBA, SGML, HyTime, HTML, WWW, Fresco, etc.

Privately ported 4 operating systems, including very early linux and BSD to the NEC PC9801 hardware



1988-1990 TCLC, Tokyo Japan Assistant Manager

Developed training programs for new instructors

Developed automated testing application using mark-sheets.

Developed internal database systems for tracking and managing scheduling teachers.

Developed database for English-Japanese dictionary, and application for machine translation.



1986-1988 TCLC, Tokyo Japan Teacher

Taught English to Japanese Businessmen, typically in 2-week intensive courses.

Developed CAI (Computer Aided Instruction) programs.



 
Patents

3 Patent Applications Related to DynaWeb, Inso Corporation Assignee

Computer system and method for customizing context information sent across with document fragments across a computer network. Patent# 6,167,409

 
Presentations and Publications

Building Global Portals, Portals Exposed, Miami, March 2001

XML and E-Government, E-GOV Conference, Washington, April 2001

XML and Effective Content Management, Extreme XML, New York, April 2001

XTND Submission to the W3C, November 2000

XEXPR Submission to the W3C, November 2000

XSL Submission to the W3C - co-authored with Sharon Adler et al. This later became the XSL standard.

The FLEX users manual. 125+ pages, published by the Free Software Foundation (ISBN 1-882114-21-3)

The MIME file type (IETF draft-nicol-mime-type.txt)

Keynote presentation at SGML Asia-Pacific (multibyte/multilingual processing in SGML)

Internationalization of the HyperText Markup Language (IETF draft-ietf-i18n-03.txt which became IETF RFC 2070 which became a W3C recommendation and was included in HTML 4.0)

The Multilingual WWW (seminal paper on WWW I18N) published:

  • Online version, December 1994
  • LISA Forum Newsletter, February 1996
  • OII Spectrum, February 1995

The Multilingual WWW, presentation at SGML Asia-Pacific1995

Supporting Large Coded Character Sets in SGML, SGML Asia-Pacific 1995

Postcard from Tokyo on HTML, <TAG> May 1995

DynaWeb: Interfacing large SGML repositories and the WWW (paper and presentation at WWW 95, Boston)

DynaWeb, Delivering content based on client preferences, 9th International Unicode Conference

DynaWeb, Delivering content based on client preferences, 10th International Unicode Conference

Making Natural Language Markup Natural, 11th International Unicode Conference

Global Character and Glyph Repositories, 11th International Unicode Conference

A Simple Generic Markup Language. 11th International Unicode Conference

The Document Object Model: An Introduction, 12th International Unicode Conference

XLL and XSL: Syntax and Semantics, 12th International Unicode Conference

Global Access to Technical Documentation: http://docs.sun.com, 12th International Unicode Conference

Multilingual and Parallel Aligned Texts: Putting XML and XLL to work. 12th International Unicode Conference.

Primary source for - A Cyberspace front in the Multicultural War, August 7th, 1995, NY Times

Information Management Using SGML. Keynote address at SGML Users Group Korea, 1996

Online publishing: the future. Presentation at the Japan Electronic Publishing Society, 1995

The WWW, What it is, where it's going, and why. Unix expo, Japan, 1994

The State of 3 Free Operating Systems. Unix Expo, Japan 1994

Computerized Publishing: A look at the past and future, Gakken, 1995

The Tale of Three W's: The WWW What it is, where it's going, and why. Gakken, Tokyo, 1995

I Met A Space That Wasn't There. Squib in Markup Technologies 1999.

XML and Scholarly Publishing, Scholarly Publishers Interest Group Meeting, Washington, 1998

Some Applications of Hypermedia: Why the WWW scores an <a>-, GLOCOM WWW Seminar, Tokyo

Perspective for XML/EDI, DCI, 1998

eBT XML seminars, St. Paul, Chicago, 1999

XML for fun and profit

XML tutorial

 
Standards Activites
IETF HTTP WG Participated in early IETF work on HTTP 0.9 and HTTP 1.0, especially with regard to SGML/HTML and MIME compatibility and I18N.
IETF HTML 2.0 WG Early member involved in the design of tables, and especially on the formal DTD, and compatibility/definition in terms of SGML.
W3C HTML Co-authored the I18N specification for HTML, which became a W3C Recommendation and was later, incorporated into HTML 4.0 and XHTML. Currently active in reviewing XHTML I18N.
IETF MIME-SGML Principal contributor to the WG, especially in the design and implementation of a catalog based packaging mechanism.
IETF MIME-HTML Invited expert based on earlier MIME-SGML experience.
IETF MIME-XML Currently an invited expert based on earlier MIME-SGML experience.
VRML Participated in early design work, and later on the XML encoding of VRML.
SGML Open/Oasis Member of technical discussion groups on SGML fragments, catalogs, I18N, and entity management.
XML One of the original working group members, later an interest group member as an invited expert. Contributed significantly to the I18N aspects of XML.
XML Infoset Invited expert based on experience with SGML Property Sets in DSSSL and HyTime (ISO 10179 and ISO 10740).
XSL Co-author of the original XSL proposal. Worked with Sharon Adler (chair) and James Clark (editor) on various aspects. Currently an IG member as an invited expert.
XLL Participated in the early design work with Steve DeRose (editor), and worked on Xpath syntax and semantics. Currently a WG member as an invited expert.
SVG Produced an early SVG definition, and participated as an invited expert during 1998.
DOM WG Editor for level 1 DOM. Produced the initial proposal for the level one core API'ss based on SGML properties. Significant contributor to basic API's and data model. Responsible for production of the DOM specification until mid 1998. Currently an invited expert on the DOM WG.
W3C I18N WG Currently an invited expert on I18N responsible for reviewing W3C specifications and also for defining I18N interoperability standards such as character models, normalization models, etc.
ISO SC22 WG - internationalization Currently an invited expert on the SC22 mailing lists.
XML/EDI A founding member of the XML/EDI initiative. Currently reviewing specifications as a general IG member.
DSSSL and HyTime Acted as a reviewer for both standards.
 
Programming Skills/Languages

Strong in architectural design and OO analysis.

JAVA C C++ LISP VB Pascal LISP prolog perl python etc.

 
Miscellaneous Fluent in spoken Japanese, and read and write to a degree.