James D. Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, has been a writer, systems developer, and manufacturing engineer at U.S. Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge since the late 1970s. In 1981, he joined the ISO's work on standards for document management and interchange. He has chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, and related standards, since 1985. Dr. Mason has been a frequent writer and speaker on standards and their applications. For his work on SGML, Dr. Mason has received the Gutenberg Award from Printing Industries of America and the Tekkie Award from GCA. Dr. Mason was chairman of the Knowledge Technologies 2002 conference sponsored by IDEAlliance and was a co-chair of Extreme Markup Languages 2003. He is currently working on information systems to support manufacturing and the classification community at DOE's Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.