Owen Ambur began his career on Capitol Hill in 1973 with newly elected Congressman Jim Abdnor (R-SD) in 1973. He served as the Senator’s legislative director and chief of staff. While at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he implemented an agency-wide electronic document management system. In early 2000, Owen co-founded and chaired the government-wide XML Community of Practice that proposed StratML.
StratML is an XML vocabulary and schema for strategic plans, which was approved as an international standard (ISO 17469-1) in 2015. Under his leadership as chair of the StratML Committee, StratML Part 2, Performance Plans and Reports, was published in 2017 as an American national standard (ANSI/AIIM 22:2017). Retiring from his position as chief XML strategist at the Department of the Interior in January 2007, Owen continues to actively promote open, standardized, machine-readable public records, a concept codified in law in 2019, the OPEN Government Data Act.