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Xavier C. FRANC   Software designer and developer Mail: Phone: +33 1 39 58 57 87

EDUCATION

1981: Graduate engineer of the Ecole Supérieure d'Électricité (Paris), option computer science.

1982: DEA (postgraduate diploma) University Paris VI, artificial intelligence and pattern recognition.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

I have an extensive experience of development in structured documents, SGML, and XML going back to 1986.

My background is mainly about core technology and high-level middleware development, but I have also achieved a number of projects involving graphics and graphical user interfaces.

I have been a self-employed developer and consultant since 1991.

• My latest creation is Qizx, a XML Query search engine including an open source part: Qizx/open.
• The biggest project I have achieved is Balise, a SGML/XML processor developed in the 90's by AIS software (a subsidiary of Berger-Levrault, later acquired by INSO). Balise's career is now almost over, mainly due to an unfortunate takeover of the company, but for several years it has been regarded as one of the most powerful SGML/XML processing tools and is still used by large companies like Airbus Industries.
  Balise is controlled by an interpreted language close to Javascript, and works with kind of predecessors of SAX and DOM (several implementations of documents, including a persistent one featuring compression). It uses James Clark's SP parser, a XML parser written by myself, and has a RTF parser/converter. Balise is Unicode capable, threadable, has modules for networking, persistent storage, database connectivity (ODBC, Oracle), debugging and profiling.
  The code I wrote represents more than 80% of the whole Balise system and amounts to about 140,000 lines of C++.
• I have also developed miscellaneous projects for AIS, Genethon (French research in genetics), and Renault F1 via Pixware, among which:
  • Implementation and rewriting of algorithms for genetics (Genethon),
  • Styled SGML viewer (AIS),
  • Conversion of legacy documents to SGML (AIS),
  • Specialized editors and graphic components in Java (Pixware)
  • ActiveX for edition of graphic annotations on large images (AIS)
  • Virtual measure instruments in Java (Pixware)
  • Pattern recognition on geographic images (AIS).
  • A Java spell-checking component (XMLmind) that has become a commercial product.

Before 1991, I was employed in several companies:

• GRIF SA was developing and marketing Grif, a wysiwyg `structured' editor (later SGML) created by a researcher, Vincent Quint. Grif is an ancestor of the W3C's Amaya. I was a lead developer from 1988 to 1991, in particular I added the SGML functionalities.
  Later I started a personal project aiming at a complete redesign of Grif, but it proved a too futuristic product and for many reasons I stopped in 1994, in spite of a lot of code written.
• From 1985 to 1988, I worked at Sema-Group, a software engineering company, on Mentor and Centaur, "syntactic editors" created by researchers of the INRIA.
• From 1983 to 1985, I was a developer at CIT-Alcatel, a telecommunication equipment manufacturer. I implemented signal processing algorithms on microprogrammed DSPs. In the same company, I worked on speech recognition algorithms as a DEA study project in 1982.