About Me

Welcome to XMLgrrl.com! I’m your host, Eve Maler. On my blog, Pushing String, you’ll find commentary on digital identity, data portability, meaningful privacy, online trust, and assorted other topics.

One way to get to know me is through the nicknames I’ve collected. I’ve had the pleasure of working on a crazy quilt of technologies, protocols, policies, and methodologies over the years, and various monikers related to them have stuck. The first was XMLgrrl, reflecting my part in the creation of the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The next was the SAML Lady, bestowed by a colleague based in Japan on the occasion of a trip to Tokyo to teach the Security Assertion Markup Language, the federated identity standard. Recently I have been serving as chief UMAnitarian, working on the User-Managed Access protocol and associated adoption.

(Yes, that’s a cartoon, though based on a real photo of my head from, oh, 1998 or so. In the pre-blog era, I wrote a Web column on XML — sort of “advice for the parse-lorn”.)

(That’s a business portait of me, done in 2002 in the just-shy-of-Glamour-shots mold. If you need a different size, drop me a line.)

Here’s a bio I sometimes use for speaking engagements (last edited 11 Aug 2009):

Eve Maler is a Distinguished Engineer in PayPal‘s Identity Services group, where she drives the development of security and identity strategies for enabling consumer choice in permissioning of personal data sharing.

Eve was one of the inventors of XML; she also co-founded the SAML effort and has made major leadership, technical, and educational contributions to many other standards and technical communities. In recent times she has focused primarily on consumer trust, privacy, and empowerment issues in Web identity and permissioned data-sharing. She launched an open effort called User-Managed Access to explore long-term solutions in this area.

Eve is a sought-after public speaker, and serves as the chair of the Web Services and Identity track of the annual XML Summer School held at University of Oxford.

Eve co-authored Developing SGML DTDs: From Text to Model to Markup, a book that provided a unique methodology for information analysis and SGML schema design. Eve’s blog, Pushing String at xmlgrrl.com, touches on topics both technical and whimsical.

(Not part of my standard bio!) Some of my other interests are knitting and singing bluesy-funky rock ‘n’ roll.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.