Prospective member: Mary Nishikawa

[nisikawa@fuchinobe.oilfield.slb.com]

I have been in contact with the Tom Bellwood, Luc Clement, and Max Voskob, and have requested to be a member of this committee. I thought that it would be good to introduce myself here before the next meeting. 

The main reason for my interest here is to possibly contribute to the UDDI Spec TC V4 Requirement for Taxonomies.

Just to give you a little background about myself, I am the EDMS Technical Advisor and Electronic Publisher for the InTouch Helpdesk at Schlumberger K. K. Japan, an Oilfield Services Technology Center. I promote the use of structured modular documentation, review system enhancements, and write internal standards. I am Web Technologies Community Leader for Schlumberger and have just finished organizing a workshop in XML, Knowledge Technologies, Web Services and Databases. I previously worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a research biochemist and technical editor. My studies of the Philosophy of Aesthetic Realism (http://www.aestheticrealism.org/) have been instrumental in the modeling choices I make for building information systems. 

The following two papers that I wrote for Extreme Markup Languages 2002, 2003 are based on my work in the OASIS Topic Maps Published Subjects Technical Committee and GeoLang Technical Committee at OASIS. 
<http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme03/html/2002/Nishikawa01/EML2002Nishikawa01.html>
<http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme03/html/2003/Nishikawa01/EML2003Nishikawa01.html>

My work on Published Subjects and Topic Maps has recently been cited here:

<http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think20.html>

I think that if you take a look at these papers, you may realize why I have an interest in Taxonomies and UDDI. The XTM (XML topic map) syntax can be used for representing, classifications, taxonomies, and ontologies, and I think that it will be a good fit with UDDI.

I am a member of the Japan Delegation for ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 Document Description and Processing Languages, WG3 Information Association (Topic Maps) and I am working on requirements for a Topic Map Constraint Language with Graham Moore.
<http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0405.htm>

I hope to reuse some aspects of OWL within the context of Topic Maps for our contraint language. 

On a personal note, I have been living and working in Japan for 17 years and enjoy life with two active grade-school children.

I guess that is enough for now and I look forward to working with all of you. I need to catch up reading your specifications so I might not be able to jump in right away and please forgive me for my newbie questions when I ask them. I look forward to speaking with you at the teleconference.

Cheers,
Mary