Lars Marius Garshol is currently Development Manager at Ontopia, a leading topic map software vendor. He has been active in the XML and topic map communities as a speaker, consultant, open source developer, and technology creator for a number of years. He helped develop the standard SAX API for development and translated it to Python, and wrote an open-source validating XML parser in Python.

Lars Marius has also been responsible for adding Unicode support to the Opera web browser. His book on Definitive XML Application Development, was published by Prentice-Hall in its Charles Goldfarb series. Lars Marius is one of the editors of the ISO Topic Map Query Language standard, and also co-editor of the Topic Map data model.