Michael Howard Kay Ph.D

FBCS Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

(born 11 October 1951) is the editor of the W3C

XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subse ...

2.0 and 3.0 language specifications for performing

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

transformations, and the developer of the

Saxon XSLT Saxon is an XSLT and XQuery processor created by Michael Kay and now developed and maintained by his company, Saxonica. There are open-source and also closed-source commercial versions. Versions exist for Java, JavaScript and .NET. The current ...

and XQuery processing software.

Early life

Michael Kay is the son of Ronald Kay (1920-2019) and Alma Brigitte Kay (née Albert) (1924-2019). His father was English, his mother German; he was born in Germany but has always lived in England. Kay was educated at Salesian College in Farnborough, and then went to

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

to read

Natural Sciences Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeat ...

. He gained his

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

degree while working in the

Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. it employed 35 academic staff, 25 support staff, 35 affiliated research staff, and about 15 ...

under the supervision of

Maurice Wilkes Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010) was a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

Career

Kay spent over twenty years (1977-2001) with the British computer manufacturer International Computers Limited (ICL). He was appointed an ICL Fellow in 1990. On leaving ICL, he worked for three years with

Software AG Founded in 1969, Software AG is an enterprise software company with over 10,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries. The company is the second largest software vendor in Germany, and the seventh largest in Europe. Software AG is traded on t ...

before forming his own company, Saxonica. He has previously been involved in GedML:

Genealogical Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kins ...

Data in XML.

Publications

Kay is the author of the book ''XSLT: Programmer's Reference'' by

Wrox Press Wrox Press (established in 1992) is a computer book publisher, originally based in Birmingham, England. Wrox uses a "programmer to programmer" approach, as all books published by Wrox are written by software developers. The original books were ea ...

and several other books and papers on software engineering. He lives and works in

Reading Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of Letter (alphabet), letters, symbols, etc., especially by Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process invo ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

and is a member of the XML Guild and a regular speaker at the XML Summer School in

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the Un ...

and Balisage

Markup Markup or mark-up can refer to: * Markup language, a standardized set of notations used to annotate a plain-text document's content to give information regarding the structure of the text or instructions for how it is to be displayed ** Lightweigh ...

conference.

References

1951 births Living people Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge ICL Fellows International Computers Limited people XML Guild Fellows of the British Computer Society People educated at Salesian College, Farnborough {{compu-bio-stub