Peter Benson

Executive Director & Chief Technology Officer,

Electronic Commerce Code Management Association (ECCMA)

email: Peter.Benson-at-eccma.org

Mr. Peter Benson is the Executive Director and Chief Technical Officer of the Electronic Commerce Code Management Association (ECCMA).

He is an expert in distributed information systems, content encoding and master data management. He designed one of the very first commercial electronic mail software applications, WordStar Messenger and was granted a landmark British patent in 1992 covering the use of electronic mail systems to maintain distributed databases.

Peter designed and oversaw the development of a number of strategic distributed database management systems used extensively in the UK and US by the Public Relations and Media Industries. From 1994 to 1998, Peter served as the elected chairman of ANSI ASCX 12E, the US Standards Committee responsible for the development and maintenance of EDI standards for product data.

Peter is known for the design, development and global promotion of the UNSPSC as an internationally recognized commodity classification and for the design of the eOTD, an internationally recognized open technical dictionary based on the NATO codification system.

Peter is the project leader for ISO 8000 the new international standard for data quality and for ISO 22745 the new standard for open technical dictionaries, he is also the ISO TC184/SC4 Quality Committee convener. He is an expert on the creation and maintenance of unambiguous language independent master data and the generation of high quality descriptions that are the heart of today's ERP applications and the next generation of high speed and high relevance internet searches.

Peter is an internationally recognized proponent of open standards and public domain metadata critical for data portability and data preservation. Peter has been instrumental in focusing international attention not only on data quality issues but also on the serious intellectual property issues caused by proprietary metadata that can lead to an organization's loss of rights in its own data.