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Tim Bray

Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Open Text Corporation and Antarctica Systems. Currently, Tim is the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems.

Early life

Tim was born on June 21, 1955 in Alberta, Canada. He grew up in Beirut, Lebanon and graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science (double major in Mathematics and Computer Science) from the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. Tim described his switch of focus from Math to Computer Science this way: "In math I’d worked like a dog for my Cs, but in CS I worked much less for As — and learned that you got paid well for doing it.

Fresh out of university, Tim joined Digital Equipment Corporation in Toronto as a software specialist. In 1983, Tim left DEC for Microtel Pacific Research. He joined the New Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo in 1987 as its manager. It was during this time Tim worked with SGML, a technology that would later become central to both Open Text Corporation and his XML and Atom standardization work.

Entrepreneurship

Waterloo Maple

Tim Bray served as the part-time CEO of Waterloo Maple Inc. during 1989-1990. Waterloo Maple is the developer of the popular Maple mathematical software.

Open Text Corporation

Bray left the new OED project in 1989 to co-found Open Text Corporation with two colleagues. Open Text was the commercialization vehicle for the high-performance search engine employed in the new OED project.

Tim recalled that “in 1994 I heard a conference speaker say that search engines would be big on the Internet, and in five seconds all the pieces just fell into place in my head. I realized that we could build such a thing with our technology.” Thus in 1995, Open Text released the Open Text Index, one of the first popular commercial web search engines. Open Text Corporation is now publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol OTEX. From 1991 until 1996, Tim held the position of Senior Vice President - Technology.

Textuality

Tim Bray, along with Lauren Wood, ran Textuality, a successful consulting practice in the field of web and publishing technology. He was contracted by Netscape in 1999 in part to create a new version, with Ramanathan V. Guha, of Meta Content Framework called Resource Description Framework (RDF), that used the XML language.

Antarctica Systems

In 1999 he founded Antarctica Systems, a Vancouver, Canada-based company that specializes in visualization-based business analytics.

Standardization efforts

XML

As an Invited Expert at the World Wide Web Consortium between 1996 and 1999, Bray co-edited the XML and XML namespace specifications. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement with Netscape, provoking vociferous protests from Netscape competitor Microsoft (who had supported the initial moves to bring SGML to the web.) Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft's Jean Paoli as third co-editor.

In 2001, Tim Bray wrote an article called Taxi to the Future for Xml.com which proposed a means to improve web client user experience and web server system performance via a Transform-Aggregate-send XML-Interact architecture -- this proposed system is very similar to recently popularized Ajax paradigm.

W3C TAG

Between 2001 and 2004 he served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

Atom

Until October 2007, Tim was co-chairing, with Paul Hoffman, the Atom-focused Atompub Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Atom is a web syndication format developed to address perceived deficiencies with the RSS 2.0 format.