Ivan Herman

My Work at W3C | Contact information | Short CV | Upcoming trips | Public presentations

My Work at W3C

I am Semantic Web Activity Lead; that is my main work at W3C. I am member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee) (the committee coordinating the yearly WWW conference series), serving as a liaison for W3C, and of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences series.

As part of my work, I also participate in lots of outreach activities, and I regularly make presentations, tutorials, etc. You can consult my list of presentations for further details.

Contact information

Email:: ivan@w3.org
(sha1sum: 5ac8032d5f6012aa1775ea2f63e1676bafd5e80b)
Postal address:: C/o Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI)
Kruislaan 413, P.O. Box 94079, 1090 GB Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Phone numbers:: phone: +31-20-5924163
mobile phone: +31-641044153
fax: +31-20-5924312
PGP/GPG:: My GnuPGP key and signature is available on-line.
FOAF:: You can either extract a short FOAF information from this page, of consult my more complete, public FOAF file.
Misc:: I am often on freenode, (acc. name IvanHerman; primarily on the #swig channel).
I am (of course…) present on a number of online accounts and services, like: LinkedIn (acc. number 2352277), Dopplr (acc. name IvanHerman), Flickr (acc. ivan_herman), Linked Open Data community (acc. ivan).
My URI (as a real person): http://www.ivan-herman.net/me

Short CV

I graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI I joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where I worked for 6 years (and turned into a computer scientist…). I left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, I joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where I have a tenure position since 1988. I received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. I joined the W3C Team as Head of W3C Offices in January 2001 while maintaining my position at CWI. I served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when I was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position, which is now my principal work at W3C.

Before joining W3C I worked in quite different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but I spend most of my research years in computer graphics and information visualization. I also participated in various graphics related ISO standardization activities and software developments. My separate “professional” home page contains a list of my publications, my public presentations, and details of the various projects I participated in the past. There is also a dblp entry for my publication generated automatically (although I am not sure it is complete…). (B.t.w., based on my publications, my Erdős number is ≤4…)

In my previous life (i.e., before joining W3C…) I was member of the Executive Committee of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and I was vice-chair of the Association between 2000 and 2002. I was the co-chair of the 9^th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000; since then, I have also been member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series. Since autumn 2007 I am also member of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences series.

I have also developed some software (in Python) that might be of interest. An example is an SPARQL (RDF Query Language) API implementation on the top the RDFLib package. This package has recently been added to the latest release of RDFLib with a proper SPARQL language parser. This work was done Chimezie Ogbuji. I have also developed (and maintain) a RDFa Distiller software, ie, a Python implementation of the RDFa syntax, as well as a small package to interface SPARQL queries from Python.

A more detailed CV is also available online. Also, see my separate page with my personal blog if you are curious about more private things, including some of my photos that I put on the Web…

Upcoming Trips

22 August, 2008: Tutorial at a Search & Find meeting, Ghent, Belgium.
23 to 27 September, 2008: ESTC2008 (2^nd Annual Europan Semantic Technology Conference), Vienna, Austria.
19 to 26 October, 2008: TPAC2008 (W3C Technical Plenary/Advisory Committee Meeting Week), Mandelieu, France
26 to 31 October, 2008: ISWC2008 (7^th International Semantic Web Conference), Karlsruhe, Germany
18 to 23 November, 2008: IW3C2 meeting, Hyderabad, India.
9 to 10 December, 2008: SW in Oil & Gas Workshop, Houston, TX, USA (dates of the trip are not fixed yet).

References to my public presentations

I have a number of slide sets “in progress”, which I use for finalized, public presentations. You are welcome to consult those. The list below refers to the presentations I have given or will give at various events.

The last 6 months:

March 2008

7 March: Karl Dubost and Ivan Herman give a talk entitled "State of the Semantic Web" at the "INTAP Semantic Web Conference 2008" on Friday, 7 March 2008, in Tokyo, Japan. (see abstract)

Abstract:

The presentation will give a short review on the state of adoption of the Semantic Web today, as well as some of the latest developments. Technologies and developments such as linking open data, RDFa, role of SPARQL, OWL1.1, rules will all be addressed. The presentation will also provide examples of how the Semantic Web is used in practice by major companies or public institutions.

April 2008

21 April: Ben Adida, Elias Torres, and Ivan Herman give a tutorial entitled "RDFa: Extensible Structured Data in HTML" and Ivan Herman gives a tutorial entitled "Introduction to the Semantic Web (through an example…)" at " The 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008)" , on Monday, 21 April 2008, in Beijing, China.

May 2008

5 May: Ivan Herman gives a talk entitled "What is the Semantic Web?" and participates at a panel entitled "XBRL and the Semantic Web" at the " 17th International XBRL Conference" , on Monday, 5 May 2008, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
18, 22 May: Ivan Herman gives a talk entitled "State of the Semantic Web" (see abstract) on Sunday, 18 May 2008 and participates at a panel entitled "Bringing SemTech Back to the Business" (see abstract) on Thursday, 22 May 2008 at the " 2008 Semantic Technology Conference" , San Jose, CA, USA.
Abstract for “State of the Semantic Web”:

The history of the Semantic Web goes back several years now. It is worth looking at what has been achieved, where we are, and where we are going. Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) leads us through this as we prepare for a week of deep discussions with people from all parts of the community of semantic technologies.

Abstract for “Bringing SemTech Back to the Business”:

With a panel of leaders from the semantic technology industry, this session will give us the opportunity to reflect on the many discussions that have taken place during the week of SemTech 2008 and help us map the course as we prepare to extend those conversations back into our workplaces. We will touch on issues of ROI, making the case for semantic technologies in the enterprise, and what to expect in the coming year in the semantic tech space.

June 2008

19 June: Ivan Herman gives a keynote entitled "États des lieux du Web sémantique" at the "19èmes Journées Francophones d'Ingénierie des Connaissances (IC2008) (19th Francophone Knowledge Engineering Days)" on Thursday, 19 June 2008, in Nancy, France.

August 2008

22 August: Ivan Herman gives a tutorial entitled "Detailed introduction into RDF and the Semantic Web" at the "4th Search & Find Workshop" on Friday, 22 August 2008, in Ghent, Belgium.

Upcoming:

September 2008

24 September: Ivan Herman gives a tutorial entitled "Introduction to the Semantic Web" at the "2nd European Semantic Technology Conference" on Wednesday, 24 September 2008, in Vienna, Austria.

October 2008

26 October: Michael Hausenblas , Ivan Herman , and Ben Adida give a tutorial entitled "RDFa—Bridging the Web of Documents and the Web of Data" at the "7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008)" on Sunday, 26 October 2008, in Karlsruhe, Germany. (see abstract)

Abstract:

RDFa is the bridge between the Web of Documents, targeting at human users, and the Web of Data, focusing on machines. Not only due to the recent uptake of RDFa (Digg, Yahoo!, etc.), learning how and where to use RDFa is essential. This tutorial will introduce the usage of RDFa in real-world use cases and will enable the attendees to work with RDFa both on the client as on the server side. We will create, publish and consume RDFa-marked-up data in the course of the tutorial and discuss advanced aspects, such as dynamic content handling. There are no pre-requisites for participation in the tutorial other than a familiarity with the basics of the (Semantic) Web such as URIs, RDF, XHTML, and SPARQL.

For a complete list of presentations over the past few years see, for example, the relevant page of my “professional” CV or the same data in RDF.