Ivan Herman

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 1.0 API, a (partial) implementation on the top the RDFLib package. This package has then been added to RDFLib with a proper SPARQL language parser contributed by the community. I have also developed (and still maintain) a RDFa Distiller service, ie, a Python implementation of RDFa 1.1, a similar tool for the conversion of microdata to RDF and, finally, a simple OWL 2 RL reasoner software. The RDFa and Microdata packages (both are also available on github) are also part of the core RDFLib package as parser plugins. I also developed a small package to interface SPARQL queries from Python; this software has been moved to sourceforge, and is effectively maintained by Sergio Fernández and Carlos Tejo Alonso (CTIC, Spain). I am also co-author of the GraphML Specification, one of the de-facto standard exchange formats for graph visualization packages.