JimMelton

Jim Melton

Email: MailTo(jim DOT melton AT SPAMFREE acm DOT org)

Jim has been "doing standards" for the majority of his career. Among other (perhaps dubious) accomplishments are: editor of all parts of the international and American SQL standards for more than two decades and USA Head of Delegation to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC32; participant in the SQL Access Group, the X/Open Data Management Committee, and the INCITS H2 (Database) Task Group that created SQL/XML; and co-Chair (with Andrew Eisenberg) of the W3C's XML Query WG (not to mention co-editor of about about a half-dozen of that WG's specs). He has somehow managed to do the same job, sitting in the same chair, for three consecutive companies: the lamented Digital Equipment Corporation, Sybase, and now Oracle.

Jim has also authored and/or co-authored five books covering various aspects of the SQL standard and one book addressing the subject of Querying XML. Additionally, he is a frequent (possibly even popular) speaker at industry conferences related to data management and XML technologies, and has published something like 50 or 60 papers (who keeps count of these things!), perhaps 15 of those refereed.

Jim's W3C-related interests include all aspects of XQuery, XPath, XSLT, XML Schema, and the Semantic Web.

In real life, Jim is an avid hiker and backpacker and an ever more avid scuba diver, and is the owner (with his wife, Barbara Edelberg) and captain of a Passport 40' sailboat on which he hopes to someday do a circumnavigation. His real mission in life, however, is rescuing Shetland Sheepdogs, and is a founding board member of Sheltie Rescue of Utah.

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