Peter Flynn

Personal

Born in Chippenham (Wiltshire) England, 5 September 1953
Married, 3 children (18f, 14m, 10f)
Employment: Research and Academic Computing Projects Manager, Computer Center, University College, Cork, Ireland

Education

Primary/Secondary

  • 1959-1961, Potton End, Hertfordshire, England
  • 1962-1972, Warwick School, Warwick, England
  • Ordinary Level Exams (8 subjects)
  • Advanced Level (German, French, Art)

University

  • 1972-1973, University of Exeter, England: 1st year Combined Honors BA (German & French)
  • 1973, University of Innsbruck, Austria: Germanistik
  • 1974-1976, London College of Printing: Higher National Diploma (HND): Business Studies (Distinction). Dissertation: The Market for Printed Music - Technological Advances
  • 1976-1978, University of Westminster: MBA specializing in computerized planning. Thesis: Computer Technology and Forecasting in the Printing Industry.

Employment history

Over 25 years’ experience in computing, communications, analysis, data processing management, training and consultancy.

  • 1978-1984, Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster): Part-time Lecturer in Computing. Also taught evening classes in the Management School in business programming and analysis.
  • 1978-1980, Printing and Publishing Industry Training Board: Manpower Planning Advisor, developing and testing a computerized training information and forecasting system for the UK printing and publishing industry.
  • 1980-1982 Deputy DP Manager at the same Training Board with responsibility for MIS software development, and providing DP consultancy to the industry.
  • 1982-1984, United Information Services (Kansas) Inc, London office: Technical Consultant, supporting customers’ scientific, engineering, statistical, MIS database, text-processing and electronic publishing applications. Seconded to USA offices in Philadelphia and Boston in 1983 to analyze the product potential of new corporate acquisitions.
  • 1984-1985, University College Cork, Ireland: Academic Projects Manager. Managing the Academic Advisory Service in the Computer Center, which supports the teaching and research effort of the College.
  • 1985-1989, Acting Director of Computing at University College Cork, with 20 staff and an expenditure budget of IEP 1.5M pa, providing academic and administrative computing resources for the College.
  • 1989-present, Research and Academic Computing Projects Manager, managing and developing support, consultancy and contract computing in academic and commercial research.

Other responsibilities

  • (1987-1995) Deputy Director for Ireland of EARN (European Academic and Research Network, now TERENA)
  • (1986-1990) Member of the HEANET (Higher Education Authority Network) Management Committee
  • (1986-1995) Member of the HEANET Advisors’ Group
  • (1988-1992) Secretary and Irish representative to Working Group III (Directories and Naming) of RARE (Réseaux Associés pour la Recherche Européenne) and Member of SubGroup I (Networked Information Services). [RARE was contracted to the European Commission (DGXIII) to design directory and information services for Europe.]
  • Computing Consultant to EC projects under AIM (CACOHIS), DELTA, AIM II (BIOMED), and Telematics (BASELINE)
  • (1988-1993) Secretary, Munster Branch, Irish Computer Society
  • Member of Irish ISO/JTC1 WG4 (SGML) Consultative Group
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the Labyrinth Project (mediæval WWW project)
  • Technical Consultant, CELT Project (on-line Irish literature SGML database)
  • Secretary (1992-1995), TeX Users Group (digital typography)
  • Chairman, P-Stat European Users Group (data management and statistics)

Activities

  • Author of Ireland’s first email gateway (1985-86) and bidirectional fax gateway (1987-89)
  • Exhibition organizer, Joint European Networking Conference, Killarney, May 1990
  • Mailing list owner, school-l@irlearn for K-12 communications, typo-l@irlearn for typography, XML-L for XML discussion, and many others
  • Conference Manager, 5th TeX European Conference, Cork, September 1990
  • Ireland’s first Webmaster (1991: UCC was the 19th Web site in the world)
  • EU delegate to NSF/Educom workshop on iNREN (Washington, DC), April 1991
  • Guest lecturer, INET’93 Developing Countries Workshop, Stanford University, CA, August 1993
  • Organizer, joint WorldWideWeb and Text Encoding Initiative DTD/browser development meeting, Cork, November 1993
  • Member of the IETF Working Group on HTML (1994-96)
  • Principal consultant, Silmaril Consultants.
  • Member of the W3C XML SIG Experts Group (1996-98)
  • Workshop tutor, Choosing SGML software, SGML Conference, Washington DC, December 1997
  • Editorial board member, Journal of Markup Theory (MIT Press).
  • Keynote speaker, BeLux SGML Conference, Antwerp, October 1998
  • Guest lecturer on text encoding and markup, SOCRATES Summer School on Corpus Linguistics and Digitisation, Glasgow, June 1999.
  • Workshop tutor, LaTeX for SGML and XML Users, Markup Technologies Conference (part of the 1999 SGML/XML Conference), Philadelphia PA, December 1999

Bibliography

Analyzing WHO-conformant data on caries incidence, P-Stat European User Group Conference, City University, London, June 1989.
Aspects of the COSINE X.500 pilot project, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 19, pp261-264, Elsevier, 1990
Developing a low-cost electronic mail fax gateway, Joint Network Conference, Blois, France, June 1990
Programming in TeX, .EXE Magazine, August 1991, pp72-74
Developing a pop-up help system for TeX, TUG Conference, Dedham, Mass. July 1991
Using PPL for programming, .EXE Magazine, September 1991
Computer services management with P-Stat, P-Stat Conference, Princeton, NJ. October 1991
The PCL language, .EXE Magazine, December 1991
Tagging Irish manuscripts SGML’92 conference, Danvers, Mass. October 1992
Setting up text-based databases Irish Universities Information Systems Colloquium, Newcastle, Co Down, March 1993
Spinning the web: using the World-Wide Web for SGML document delivery Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and Association for Computing in the Humanities joint annual conference, Georgetown University, DC, April 1993
TeX and SGML, a recipe for disaster?, TUG Conference, Birmingham, UK. July 1993. In TUGboat Vol 14 (1993) No 3, pp227-230
How to write HTML files, WWW document, January 1994.
ACH/ALLC 1993 Conference Report (Georgetown, DC) in Literary and Linguistic Computing, 9:1, 1994, pp87-100.
HTML and TeX: Making them sweat UK TeX Users Group Conference: Portable Documents: Acrobat, SGML and TeX, London, January 1995. Reprinted in Baskerville 5.2 (Journal of the UK TeX Users Group), March 1995, and in MAPS 14 (Journal of the Nederlandstalige TeX Gebruikersgroep), 95.1
The WorldWideWeb Handbook, International Thompson Computer Press, June 1995, ISBN 0-85032-205-8
Making more use of markup SGML’95, Boston, Mass.
W[h]ither the Web? in JASIS 48:7, July 1997, p.614
The HTML Professional DTD Public-domain software and documentation for HTML, January 1997.
The XML FAQ Frequently-Asked Questions about the Extensible Markup Language, edited for the W3C SGML WG, April 1997 onwards.
SGML/XML Conference Report 1997 in Web+Open+Technologies,January 1998 (Technology Appraisals Ltd)
New whines in old battles, in WebReference, May 1998
Understanding SGML and XML Tools, Kluwer, July 1998, ISBN 0-7923-8169-6
Using the TEI Writing System Declaration (WSD). In Computers and the Humanities, 33:(1/2), pp.49-57, April 1999.
The vulcan document style package, TeX Users Group Conference, Vancouver, August 1999.