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Henry S. Thompson, Ph.D. is the Managing Director and principal consultant of Markup Systems

He is also a member of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he is Professor of Web Informatics, based in the Institute for Language, Communication and Cognition.

He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. His university education was divided between Linguistics and Computer Science, in which he holds an M.Sc. While still at Berkeley he was affiliated with the Natural Language Research Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he participated in the GUS and KRL projects. His research interests have ranged widely, including natural language parsing, speech recognition, machine translation evaluation, modelling human lexical access mechanisms, the fine structure of human-human dialogue, language resource creation, architectures for linguistic annotation, markup language design, schema languages and markup processing. His current research is focussed on the semantics of markup, XML pipelines and more generally on understanding and articulating the architectures of the Web.

He was a member of the SGML Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium which designed XML, a major contributor to the core concepts of XSLT and W3C XML Schema and is currently a member of the XML Core, XML Schema and XML Processing Model Working Groups of the W3C. He has been elected three times to the W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group). He was lead editor of the Structures part of the XML Schema W3C Recommendation, for which he co-wrote the first publicly available implementation, XSV. From 2002 through 2010 he was a member of the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where he worked in the XML Activity. He has presented many papers and tutorials on SGML, DSSSL, XML, XSLT, XML Schema, XML Pipelines and Web Architecture in both industrial and public settings over the last thirteen years.

He is available for consulting on XML in general, and in particular on information architecture development. He has experience in early-stage startup management, and can advise and mentor those who have recently started, or are planning to start, a company in the information technology space.