Jenifer Fays Alys Tennison (born 1972) is a British software engineer and consultant who co-chairs the data governance working group within the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI). She also serves on the

board of directors A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organiz ...

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

, the Global Partnership for

Sustainable Development Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The des ...

Data (GPSDD) and the information law and policy centre of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) at the University of London. She was previously Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Open Data Institute (ODI).

Education

Tennison was born in Cambridge, England and educated at the University of Nottingham gaining a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology in 1994 and a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in collaborative ontology development in 1999, supervised by Nigel Shadbolt.

Career

Tennison has been the technical architect and lead developer for

legislation.gov.uk legislation.gov.uk, formerly known as the UK Statute Law Database, is the official web-accessible database of the statute law of the United Kingdom, hosted by The National Archives. It contains all primary legislation in force since 1267 and a ...

and previously worked on the linked data aspects of data.gov.uk. Previously, she was self-employed as a consultant. Tennison has authored or co-authored papers on

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 subseque ...

, XML, structured data and knowledge bases. She has authored books including ''Beginning XSLT 2.0'', ''XSLT and XPath on the Edge'' and ''Professional XML Schemas''. Tennison was an invited expert on the

XSL In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents. Historically, the W3C XSL Working Group produced a draft specification under the name "XSL," which ...

and XML processing working groups at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and was appointed to the W3C's Technical Architecture Group (TAG) in 2011. She has previously worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation and Epistemics Ltd. Tennison is the co-creator of the open data board game Datopolis.

Awards and honours

Tennison was appointed Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE)Anon (2013) in the

2014 New Year Honours The New Year Honours 2014 were appointments by some of the 16 Commonwealth realms to various orders and honours to recognise and reward good works by citizens of those countries. The New Year Honours are awarded as part of the New Year celebrati ...

for services to Technology and Open Data.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tennison, Jeni Semantic Web people XML Guild Officers of the Order of the British Empire Living people 1972 births