Jeni Tennison


Jenifer Fay Alys Tennison OBE is a British software engineer who is currently Chief Executive Officer at the Open Data Institute.

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

Career

Tennison has been the technical architect and lead developer for legislation.gov.uk 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 several papers and books including Beginning XSLT 2.0, XSLT and XPath on the Edge and Professional XML Schemas. Tennison was an invited expert on the XSL and XML Processing Working Groups at the World Wide Web Consortium and was appointed to the W3C's Technical Architecture Group in 2011. She has previously worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation and Epistemics Ltd.

Awards and honours

Tennison was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to Technology and Open Data.