Marc de Graauw, born 1961, lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He graduated cum laude in Philosophy from Nijmegen University in 1989. As a student of Philosophy, he studied Philosophy of Language and semantics in particular. His thesis was on the reference of nouns of tangibles, i.e. the relation between words such as "chair" or "cat" and actual chairs and cats.

After university he started working in IT. In 1998 Marc continued working in IT as an independent consultant, specializing in intercompany data exchange, first in a traditional EDI environment, but soon in XML and Internet environments. Marc has published several articles (in Dutch and English) on XML en e-commerce and has been a speaker on conferences in the Netherlands. Recently he gave a presentation on XML2001 entitled 'What is "is"? Problems and solutions in mapping vocabularies.'