Introduction

Hi, folks-

I'm Bill Kasdorf, VP-Content Solutions and Principal Consultant of Apex CoVantage, a leading publishing services firm with a wide ranging practice in scholarly, reference, trade, and educational publishing as well as media. In my consulting practice I mainly help publishers and other organizations with XML/HTML5 modeling (with good knowledge of models such as JATS/BITS, DocBook, TEI, and related standards), infrastructure development, workflow, content management, and metadata. Some of my clients include the EU Publications Office, the World Bank, Pearson, Harvard Business Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Taylor & Francis, the University of Toronto Press, and a variety of other societies, organizations, and publishers.

Along with Julie, I am representing BISG on the WG, which is why I've piggy-backed onto Julie's introduction (see below for an excellent description of the BISG). I chair the BISG Content Structure Committee, which maintains the EPUB 3 Grid (epubtest.org) in collaboration with the IDPF and DAISY, publishes informative Field Guides (to Fonts, to Fixed Layout, to Interactivity, etc.), and which is currently launching two new Working Groups focused on EDUPUB and Accessibility.

I am an active participant in a number of other organizations, almost all of which have a very keen interest in the issue of annotations. I am a Past President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and active on two SSP committees, including the Organizational Collaboration Committee; I'm on the Board of the IDPF, metadata lead on its EPUB 3 WG, and active in its EDUPUB initiative; I'm an active participant in the IDEAlliance Technology Council (the governing body for PRISM and most magazine-oriented standards); and most importantly I'm co-chair of the Metadata Task Force of the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group.

I'm delighted to be involved in this crucial, domain-spanning Open Annotations initiative!

--Bill

From: Julie Morris [mailto:Julie@bisg.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2014 11:13 AM
To: Web Annotation
Subject: Introduction

Hi, all:

I'm Julie Morris with the Book Industry Study Group<https://www.bisg.org/events/educational-standards-taxonomy-working-group> (BISG), the dominant member-supported, not-for-profit trade association for the publishing industry in the US. Our members include publishers from all sectors of the industry, as well as distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and reading system and other publishing technology companies, and we conduct research, hold events, and form standards and best practices (working on standards critical to the industry such as BISAC and Thema, ONIX, and EPUB) to support greater efficiency for all members of the supply chain.

We participate in the Digital Publishing Interest Group at W3C and are interested in the potential impact of the work of the Web Annotations WG on the publishing industry's options for richer content metadata.

I'll be participating in the WG as much as time allows, and reviewing outcome documents.

Best,
Julie

Julie Morris
Project Manager: Standards & Best Practices
Book Industry Study Group | BISG.org<http://www.bisg.org/>
Tel: 646-336-7141 Ext 14
Email: julie@bisg.org<mailto:julie@bisg.org>