Standards activist Rick Jelliffe is C.T.O. of Topologi Pty. Ltd, a company making XML-related desktop tools, and spends most of his time working on editors, validators and publishing-related markup. His main standards project currently is editing an upcoming ISO standard for the Schematron schema language, which he originally developed.

As well as his work with ISO SC34 and the original XML group at W3C, Rick was a sporadic member of the W3C Schema Working Group and the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. He also blogs regularly for XML.com and digitalmedia.oreilly.com.

He is the author of The XML & SGML Cookbook; Recipes on Structured Information and lead the Chinese XML Now project at Academia Sinica Computing Centre. He lives in Sydney, Australia, and has an economics degree from Sydney University.

Disclosure: In January 2007, Rick became embroiled in a controversy after mentioning in his XML.COM blog an approach from Microsoft for a several-day contract job to correct some Wikipedia entries from a neutral point of view, as an experienced technical writer with credible first-hand knowledge of standards and procedures. This was incorrectly reported as being a secret plot to subvert Wikipedia. With the support of many editors on Wikipedia, with complete transparency, and with care to respect the Wikipedia rules, Rick has started participating on the Wikipedia entries.

The company that is the co-owner of Topologi has a long-standing training business and will be providing some presenters for some Microsoft sponsored-events in 2007 in Australasia. It is highly likely that Rick will be one of the presenters on standards matters at some of these.