Deborah A. Lapeyre

Leadership

Ms. Lapeyre has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984. She is an XML architect, an expert at XML vocabulary design and DTD and schema development.

She currently serves on the organizing committee for Balisage: The Markup Conference and has served as an organizer or co-chair for XML conferences including: Extreme Markup Languages^®, Markup Technologies, and several of the annual international XML/SGML’NN conferences.

Ms. Lapeyre has spoken and given tutorials at conferences including: the IDEAlliance XML conferences, CSW XML Summer School, Tri-XML, XPlor, XML Europe, Seybold, XML-One, Open Publish, Association for Computers in the Humanities, TechDoc, International Markup, TAG, American Association of University Publishers, SGML Europe, and has been guest speaker for many XML and SGML Users’ groups.

Skills

Document Analysis and Tag Set Development - As a senior XML consultant, she leads Document Analysis (information analysis and design) teams, constructs and modifies DTDs and schemas, and prepares detailed Document Analysis reports. As a publishing analyst, Ms. Lapeyre helps clients to analyze their information management, retrieval, and distribution requirements and to translate those requirements into functioning production systems, usually based on XML or SGML technologies.

Ms. Lapeyre was one of the principal architects and the lead writer for the Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite for the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). This journal tag set is intended for digital archives and publishers to mark up existing journal literature, books, and related material, and for archiving and transferring such material. NCBI created this highly customizable tag set to define the incoming data for PubMed Central, the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s digital archive of life sciences journal literature. Although designed for biomedical journals, the tag set is be sufficiently general to describe not only STM journals, but also technical journals in any field.

For an encyclopedia reference project in the liberal arts, she was a senior consultant and designed DTDs for both print and electronic application. She also designed print and electronic applicable DTDs for a leading pharmaceutical reference work. Ms. Lapeyre also performed design consulting for XML-based artificial intelligence applications.

Ms. Lapeyre was the lead analyst for the team that developed the Pinnacles Component Information Standard (PCIS) for the semiconductor industry, an industry-wide XML/SGML application for the interchange of semiconductor documentation. This one-year, five-session project analyzed the base document types for the standard and included participants from 5 companies and 6 countries. After the document analysis, Ms. Lapeyre led the design of the overall architecture for the Pinnacles Standard and the development of the DTDs and documentation for PCIS versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. She supervised the documentation for PCIS 1.0 through 1.2.

The American Memory Project of the Library of Congress is a multi-year effort to put the fragile reassert collections of the Library of Congress online for use by researchers. For this project, Ms. Lapeyre was the analyst for the document analysis effort, led the development of the American Memory DTD, and supervised development of the DTD documentation.

For a computer operating system software manufacturer, Ms. Lapeyre led the team that solicited the retrieval requirements and analyzed the components of nearly 20 types of programmer, user, and maintenance documentation. She wrote the DTD suite and supervised the production of extensive DTD documentation.

Ms. Lapeyre assisted in document analysis and led the development of DTDs for a large non-profit re-publisher of technical materials. This organization uses the suite of DTDs to encode documents such as journal articles, conference presentations, and research reports received from a wide variety of authors. The encoded data is then distributed in XML to the members of the organization, providing faster and less expensive distribution of the materials than photocopying and hard-copy distribution as well as providing better access to information that is of great value for a short time period.

Ms. Lapeyre led the team that developed the DTD suite that a manufacturer of heavy equipment is using to develop documents in very small re-useable subject-fragments and use those fragments in a variety of publications and media. The application based on these DTDs supports multi-lingual publishing and frequent re-use of materials.

Ms. Lapeyre was senior technical member of the team performing analysis and developing DTDs for Bills, Resolutions, and Amendments for the United States House of Representatives. The applications using these DTDs support both print and electronic distribution of the various measures, as well as aid in tracking legislation throughout its lifecycle.

Other XML projects have included design and development of DTDs, XML schemas, and XML architectures for computer manuals, medical reference volumes, electronically-encoded archival finding aids, on-line help systems, and scientific and engineering reference works. For a large, international journal publisher, Ms. Lapeyre was technical lead on the team that developed DTDs for scientific journals, including multiple article types and fully-tagged bibliographic references. She facilitated developing an XML representation of the database and interchange packages for a knowledge management software firm.

Ms. Lapeyre has developed XML and SGML applications using a variety of public applications, including the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), ISO 12083 (the AAP Standard), NCBI Archiving and Interchange DTD, and the MIL-M-28001 (DoD) application standards.

Training - In the XML area, Ms. Lapeyre has developed and taught classes in XML literacy, document analysis, XML authoring, and DTD syntax and construction. She also teaches XSLT, gives seminars for executives and managers on why XML, and has taught basic SGML and SGML DTD construction. In the days before XML and SGML, she taught proofreading, programming, computer literacy, and database searching.

For a leading XML product vendor, Ms. Lapeyre developed a technical introduction to document analysis and XML, and has taught it to over 100 staff software engineers, user support staff, and quality control personnel.

Ms. Lapeyre developed and taught classes in SAMANTHA principles and programming language and edited and coordinated the major rewrite of the SAMANTHA system and user documentation.

XML and SGML Conversions - Ms. Lapeyre is experienced in both up-translation (translation from ASCII, RTF, or another proprietary coding scheme to XML or SGML), down-translation (translation from XML to proprietary desktop publishing or word processing formats), and both SGML-to-XML and XML-to-SGML translations. She has written conversion specifications, acted as Quality Assurance on specifications written for commercial conversion vendors, and designed and coded conversion programs in a variety of programming languages.

For a publisher of medical information, Ms. Lapeyre wrote an application that created word processing formatted documents from XML files for proof printing. For that same publisher, she created another autotagger application that creates first-cut XML tagged files from desk-top publishing files. For a government user, Ms. Lapeyre developed a DTD and autotagging procedures to convert word-processing files into XML-tagged text for content retrieval from an ORACLE database.

On a project where time was extremely short and accuracy were critical, Ms. Lapeyre wrote programs to convert three manuals, consisting of fifty or so chapters, into XML. Each chapter had been authored by a different organization or at a different time, and the conversion programs were adjusted to the peculiarities of each chapter. Ms. Lapeyre then supervised the manual clean-up of the converted documents, validated the completed XML, and verified that the tagging was correct.

Programming and Systems Development - Ms. Lapeyre’s programming and development experience includes over 15 years work as a programmer and systems analyst. She has developed text formatting, photocomposition, database management and reporting, data restructuring and format conversion, and authoring applications.

For the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) electronic publishing group, Ms. Lapeyre provided user support, system support, and on-demand SGML programming and publishing services. She extended, reorganized, documented, managed, maintained, and trained the users for an on-line document entry and formatting system used to produce official IRS letter, reports, memos, and a variety of special formats from generically tagged files.

Ms. Lapeyre designed, coded, implemented, documented, and supported the formatting subsystem of GMLPLUS, an in-house SGML publishing system for producing technical manuals and computer documentation for Boeing Computer Services. The system included a fully functional mainframe-based SGML parser (one of, if not the, first full parser developed after SGML became a standard), DTDs written for the Boeing standard documents, and a parameter-driven formatting system, based on generic markup tags and written in IBM’s DCF/SCRIPT.

Ms. Lapeyre was a senior analyst on the team that produced functional specifications, an overall system design, and a working prototype for an integrated system for the input, editing, and publishing of financial tables and textual data. For this prototype, Ms. Lapeyre designed and specified workstation to mainframe-host database upload and download using Yourdon structured design techniques; supervised contract programmers and coded application modules; constructed the test bed, wrote the test plan, and managed integrated testing.

As Information Manager for the Baltimore Region Institutional Studies Center (BRISC), Ms. Lapeyre designed and programmed a retrieval system to provide file-folder-level subject access to the library’s archival connections.

Employment History

Vice President, Mulberry Technologies, Inc. - 1996 to present. Mulberry Technologies, Inc., is an XML, XSLT, and SGML consultancy specializing in design for XML system startup and XML and XSLT training.

Senior Electronic Publishing Consultant, ATLIS Consulting Group, Inc. - 1992 to 1996. ATLIS Consulting Group is a full-service SGML consulting organization, providing needs analysis, tool selection, document analysis, DTD development, user training, and implementation support.

Consultant, Managematics - 1989 to 1991. Managematics was a small firm specializing in support of electronic publishing systems.

Senior Publishing Systems Analyst, Cincinnati Bell Information Systems - 1989. The Composed Applications division of Cincinnati Bell Information Systems provided electronic consulting services to the Federal Government, especially in support of the CALS initiative.

Senior Publishing Consultant, Technalysis Corporation - 1988 to 1989. Technalysis is a technical services provider to government agencies including the Internal Revenue Service, providing computer operations, programming, and development personnel including SGML expertise.

Senior Analyst-Computing, Boeing Computer Services - 1985 to 1987. BCS provided time-sharing services, hot-line and problem diagnosis, and an extensive line of computer manuals both to other divisions within the Boeing Company and to private industry.

Senior Technical Consultant, Aspen Systems - 1982 to 1985. Aspen Systems is an Information Management Company, providing database and publishing services to industry and government, and was an early developer of full-text search and retrieval software.

Project Manager, Information & Publishing Systems - 1978 to 1982. I&P created and sold SAMANTHA, a proprietary data-encoding format and text manipulation language used to produce multiple publications from a single encoded data repository.

Education

M.L.S., Information Storage and Retrieval Systems - College of Library and Information Science, University of Maryland at College Park, 1977

B.A., Biology/Geology, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, 1972