Bio: Ilya Zaslavsky is a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial data analysis specialist, with experience in university-level research, training and project management. He received his Ph.D. from University of Washington (1995) for research on statistical analysis and reasoning models for geographic data in multi-layer GIS. Previously, he received a Candidate of Sciences degree (Ph.D.equivalent) from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geography, for a study of metropolitan evolution (1990), and an M.A. equivalent from Moscow State University (Moscow, USSR) where he developed simulation models of urban systems. Between 1995-98, Zaslavsky was on the faculty at Western Michigan University (WMU), Department of Geography. In 1997-99, he worked for the Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering at San Diego State University, where he was the lead developer of Sociology Workbench, a collection of on-line tools for social scientists and data analysts. During 1997/98, he taught his regular classes at WMU from San Diego in real time, using web-based collaborative software. In March 2000, he joined the Enabling Technologies group of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. His research focuses on spatial databases, Web-based GIS, and XML-based mediation between heterogeneous geographic sources.