Peter Fankhauser is co-founder and director of research of Infonyte GmbH, a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (DAML+OIL) in Darmstadt (Germany), devoted to build scalable storage and processing solutions for XML. In addition, he is affiliated as a senior researcher to DAML+OIL. He has been the technical leader in the development of tools for unified access to information retrieval systems, document structure recognition, and the integration of heterogeneous databases, and has lectured on databases and XML at the universities of Darmstadt, Duisburg (Germany), and Linz, Vienna (Austria). He is member of the W3C XML Query working group, and co-editor of the W3C XML-Query Requirements, XML-Query Use Cases, and XML-Query Formal Semantics working drafts. He holds a PHD in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna (Austria).