I started my work with W3C in January 1998 when W3C launched its German Office as part of the W3C Leverage Action which was a project funded by the European Union. I became the first manager of the office. The scope of the office was extended to Austria in 2002 making it the German Austrian Office. My Office work was on raising membership, giving presentaions on regional conferences, maintaining press relations, keep in touch with regional government, organisations and associations (like DIN, ISOC, BITKOM). The main task was to act as local point of contact for W3C.

1999 I became AC rep of GMD (the hosting institution for the W3C office) which was merged with Fraunhofer in 2000. 2000 I became AC rep of Fraunhofer. In 2003 I was elected to the W3C Advisory Board. 2005 I left Fraunhofer on base of an early retirement program. I've launched my own company ict-Media GmbH and work from there for the W3C World Offices Team and the W3C Communications Team on a part time basis. By June 2007 my job description slightly changed. As offices coordinator I support and coordinate the operations of W3C's world offices.

Contact Information

Short Bio

Work:

Networking related work:

Some books

The first book I'ld like to mention is Carl Malamud's Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue. In the early days of the internet (late 80th early 90th) Carl travelled around the world to meet people that worked in their region to develop and extend the internet. I met Carl in Bonn (Germany) and discussed with him the german situation at that time.

Another book - a bit later than Carl's - is from Neil Randall: The Soul of the Internet: Net Gods, Netizens, Wiring of the World where Neil presented a lot of pioneers and their ideas on internet. I talked with him about the german and the european situation. For this book there is also a a japanese translation (インターネットヒストリー―オープンソース革命の起源).

From 2001 is a book that was published by the Bertelsmann foundation (Marcell Machill, ed.): Wer regiert das Internet?; Who Controls the Internet? This book is about internet gouvernance and the role of different organisations. I contributed an article about IPv6 as an example for the why and how - success- and failure- criteria of a standard.

When I was head of the German-Austrian W3C office we started together with Addison Wesley a bookseries on W3C standards: <edition:w3c.de>. The idea was to publish translations of W3C standards together with comments and explanations provided by the expert translators. Actually only 2 books that covered some 10 W3C recommendations ever appeared. XML & Co. on the XML core standards and XHTML, CSS & Co. on the online publishing standards. Editor was the german XML evangelist Stefan Mintert.

In 2006 Springer in cooperation with the Semantic Web School in Vienna published a book entitled: Semantic Web - Wege zur vernetzten Wissensgesellschaft (Tassilo Pellegrini, Andreas Blumauer ed.). It covers the topic Semantic Web from a lot of perspectives like technology, social impact, philosophy, underlying math, logics, standards, ... I wrote a chapter on W3C's Semantic Web Standards.

The next book I'ld like to present was started by late Mario Jeckle who tragically died in an accident in 2004. Mario was a W3C AC-rep and also a member of the W3C TAG. He together with some colleagues started this book entitled Service-oriente Architekturen mit Web Services. After his tragic death the others in the authors team decided to finish the work and I was honoured and moved when they asked me to write the preface.

Semantic Content Engineering is the proceedings of the 2005 Semantics Conference in Viena. I contributed a statement for the panel "Semantic Web: are we there yet?" on the present state an future of Semantic Web dissemination in practice.

Bildungsportale is the procedings of a workshop on portals with educational resources. For a panel I presented a statement on how Web 2.0 and Semantic Web Technologies can be used to better interconnect different educational portals.

Recent Presentations

Upcoming Talks

There were no presentations based on those constraints.

Past Talks

October 2008

2 October: Klaus Birkenbihl and Ivan Herman give a talk on behalf of the Brazil Office entitled "On the Way to the Semantic Web" at the "Rio Info 2008" on Thursday, 2 October 2008, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (see abstract)

Abstract:

High level introduction on the benefits of complementing the Web of documents by a Web of data.

September 2008

30 September: Klaus Birkenbihl and Ivan Herman give a talk on behalf of the Brazil Office entitled "On the Way to the Semantic Web" at the "W3C Brazil meeting" on Tuesday, 30 September 2008, in São Paulo, Brazil. (see abstract)

Abstract:

High level introduction on the benefits of complementing the Web of documents by a Web of data.

November 2007

27 November: Klaus Birkenbihl and Ivan Herman give a talk on behalf of the Germany and Austria Office entitled "Wege zum Semantischen Web (Ways to the Semantic Web)" at the "ISOC German Chapter Mitgliederversammlung" on Tuesday, 27 November 2007, in Frankfurt, Germany. (see abstract)

Abstract:

repetition of the talk given on 18 October 2007, in Darmstadt, Germany.

October 2007

18 October: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a talk on behalf of the Germany and Austria Office entitled "Wege zum Semantischen Web (Ways to the Semantic Web)" at the "4. Kongress Semantic Web und Wissenstechnologien " on Thursday, 18 October 2007, in Darmstadt, Germany.

September 2007

19 September: Klaus Birkenbihl gives an invited talk on behalf of the Germany and Austria Office entitled "W3C und W3C World Offices (W3C and W3C World Offices)" at the "Deutschland und China - Innovationspartner in der Informationstechnologie (Germany and China - an Innovative Partnership in Information Technology)" on Wednesday, 19 September 2007, in Potsdam (near Berlin), Germany. (see abstract)

Abstract:

General talk about W3C with some focus on offices esp. introducing our offices in China and Germany

July 2007

4 July: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a talk on behalf of the Germany and Austria Office entitled "An Open Platform for Standardisation: WWW" at the "Workshop zur Verbesserung der Informationsmöglichkeiten und Erhöhung der Transparenz in der IKT-Standardisierung (Informationsplattform)" on Wednesday, 4 July 2007, in Potsdam (near Berlin), Germany. (see abstract)

Abstract:

W3C has rules and tools in place to standardize in an open and transparent way.

April 2007

19 April: Klaus Birkenbihl and Ivan Herman give a talk on behalf of the Germany and Austria Office entitled "Semantic Web: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit (Semantic Web: Claims and reality)" at the "Handlungsschemata als Grundlage visueller und begrifflicher Strukturierung in der Wissensrepräsentation (Visual and Conceptual Structuring of Action-dependent Knowledge Representation)" on Thursday, 19 April 2007, in Paderborn, Germany.

March 2007

6 March: Klaus Birkenbihl and Ivan Herman give a talk on behalf of the Germany and Austria Office entitled "Semantic Web" at the "ZKI Frühjahrstreffen" on Tuesday, 6 March 2007, in Dortmund, Germany.

February 2007

1 February: Klaus Birkenbihl participates at a panel on behalf of the Spain Office entitled "Interaction between Web Standards and e-Government" at the "European W3C Symposium on eGovernment" between Thursday, 1 February, and Friday, 2 February 2007, in Gijón, Spain.

December 2006

8 December: Klaus Birkenbihl participates at a panel entitled "WEB 2.0 for Portals (Panel)" at the "Bildungsportale: Potenziale und Perspektiven (Educational Portals: potentials and perspectives)" on Friday, 8 December 2006, in Tübingen, Germany.

September 2006

27, 24 September: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a talk entitled "Standards for machine to machine communication" on Wednesday, 27 September 2006 and Klaus Birkenbihl and Ivan Herman give a talk entitled "Auf dem Weg ins Semantische Web (On the Way to the Semantic Web)" (see abstract) on Wednesday, 24 September 2008 at the " W3C-Tag (W3C Day)" , Berlin, Germany.
Abstract for “Auf dem Weg ins Semantische Web”:

High level introduction on the benefits of complementing the Web of documents by a Web of data.

November 2005

25 November: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a keynote on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "SW: Are We There Yet?" at the "Semantics 2005" on Friday, 25 November 2005, in Vienna, Austria.

October 2005

19 October: Klaus Birkenbihl and Philipp Hoschka give a talk on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "W3C mobile Web initiative" at the "ISOC.DE Mitgliederversammlung (ISOC.DE membership Assembly)" on Wednesday, 19 October 2005, in Frankfurt, Germany.
6 October: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a tutorial on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "Standards, Sprachen und Spezifikationen im Semantic Web (Standards, Languages, and Specifications for the Semantic Web)" organized by the Semantic Web School, on Thursday, 6 October 2005, in Vienna, Austria.

June 2005

20 June: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a talk on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "The Work of W3C" at the "W3C and Semantic Web" on Monday, 20 June 2005, in Vienna, Austria.
13 June: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a keynote on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "Technologien für die Zukunft des Web (Technologies for the future web)" at the "Infopark Internet Congress (Infopark Internet Congress (iico - 10th anniversary event of W3C member Infopark AG))" on Monday, 13 June 2005, in Berlin, Germany.

October 2004

13 October: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a talk on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "Bericht über die aktuelle Arbeit in W3C (Report on the current works at W3C)" at the "W3C-Tag (W3C Day)" on Wednesday, 13 October 2004, in Rosenheim, Germany.

June 2004

27 June: Klaus Birkenbihl gives an invited talk on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "Standards und Visionen: Das World Wide Web Consortium (Standards and Visions: the World Wide Web Consortium)" at the "Annual Swiss IT Leadership Forum" on Sunday, 27 June 2004, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Switzerland.

April 2004

19 April: Klaus Birkenbihl gives an invited talk on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "Standards für die Zukunft des Web (Standards for the Future of the Web)" organized by the Fachhochschule Rosenheim, on Monday, 19 April 2004, in Rosenheim, Germany.

March 2004

24 March: Klaus Birkenbihl gives an invited talk on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "Standards für die Zukunft des Web (Standards for the Future of the Web)" at the "LogOn Briefing im Rahmen der CeBIT 2004 (LogOn Briefing at CeBIT 2004)" on Wednesday, 24 March 2004, in Hannover, Germany.

January 2004

22 January: Klaus Birkenbihl gives a talk on behalf of the German and Austrian Office entitled "Die Zukunft des Web in 6 Punkten (The Future ofthe Web in 6 Points)" at the "Ausschusstreffen "Innovation und Umwelt" der IHK Köln (Workshop of the IHK Köln on Innovation and Environment)" on Thursday, 22 January 2004, in Sankt Augustin, Germany.

Klaus Birkenbihl

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