David Durand

David Durand has been thinking about and working on the future of information since the 1980’s. He was an early advocate of markup and linking technology (before the web made it commonplace). He was one of the OHCO gang at Brown in the Computing in the Humanities User Group, describing he foundations of content markup.

He received a Doctorate in Computer Science in 2000 for work in collaborative document editing without locking. While he was at BU (and afterwards) he worked for Dynamic Diagrams on web publishing systems for the Science/Technical/Medical market. As CTO at Dynamic Diagrams he led the development of one of the first web site mapping applications (MAPA), and delivered world-class web sites for McGraw-Hill, Nature, the American Medical Association, and many other clients.

He has worked on industry standards over the years, as one of the founding and continuing participants in the W3C’s effort that led to the creation of XML and later XLink, For the IETF he worked on WebDAV and URNs.

With Steven J. DeRose, he wrote Making Hypermedia Work, published by Kluwer.

He is now CEO at Tizra Inc., where he is working on ways to help publishers make the best of the data they have, rather than the data they wish they had.

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