Patrick Durusau

Patrick Durusau is an editor, document-representation standards expert and lawyer.

He has been the co-chair and co-editor of the OASIS OpenDocument Format (initially sponsored by Sun Microsystems) and editor of the equivalent ISO International Standard, the editor and technical lead for the Open Scripture Information Standard, convenor of the ISO Topic Maps standards group and editor of some of the produced standards, and was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Library of Information and Library Science, UIUC.

He was Director of Research and Development for the Society of Biblical Literature from 2000 to 2006. He is the author of High places in cyberspace.

Durusau worked as a trial lawyer in Louisiana for ten years, including defending death-row case on appeal. He contributed material to the Indigo Book of legal citation.

He was recognized as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor in 2015.

In the controversial ISO standardization of Microsoft's ECMA Open Office XML, seen by many as to some extent a rival to the Sun/IBM-sponsored OASIS OpenDocument format, Durusau called for a "co-evolutionary" approach, rather than unification or harmonization.