Introduction: Jeen Broekstra

Hello DAWG,

Allow me to briefly introduce myself. My name is Jeen Broekstra and I
work for the Dutch company Aduna[0]. I am one of the lead developers
of the Sesame framework[1], a storage and querying architecture for 
RDF in Java, and of the SeRQL ("circle") query language[2].

I received my Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Vrije
  Universiteit Amsterdam, after which I joined Aduna and simultaneously
started as a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit. My earlier PhD
work was centralized around the Ontology Inference Layer (OIL), more
specifically its RDF syntax. Later work focuses on query languages and
storage, querying and inferencing architectures for RDF.

My interest in this working group is therefore a direct extension from
both my development work on Sesame and of the main theme of my PhD
thesis: accessing information in an open environment. To that end, a
standardized query language and protocol are key.

Design choices in Sesame's functionality have always been motivated by
user needs and I believe that in that respect, I have useful things to
contribute to this WG. Apart from that, of course, I have some
practical experience in designing and implementing query languages,
which I hope will be useful.

I tend to read my e-mail regularly so that is a good way of contacting
me. Also, I regularly hang out on IRC (Freenode, channels #swig and
#foaf). I am based in Amersfoort at the Aduna office, where I can also
be reached by phone (+31 33 465 99 87), between 9:00-17:00 (GMT +1). 
Upon request I can also give you my id for Skype, MSN, AIM, ICQ or Yahoo.

I hope that the result of this WG will be a set of specs that fixes a
useful, 'lean' query language as a basis, on which toolkit developers
and users alike can agree, and which can be used as a bootstrap for
possible future extensions. In that respect, I view a quick release of
a query language stripped of 'bells and whistles' as more important
than a QL that covers every conceivable use case. Having said that, I
fully realize that opinions on what is core and what is a bell or a
whistle will differ vastly :)

This is the first time I have joined a W3C working group and I am 
looking forward to discussions with everyone and contributing to a 
successful outcome.

Regards,

Jeen

[0] http://aduna.biz/
[1] http://www.openrdf.org/
[2] http://www.openrdf.org/doc/SeRQLmanual.html
-- 
Jeen Broekstra          Aduna BV
Knowledge Engineer      Julianaplein 14b, 3817 CS Amersfoort
http://aduna.biz        The Netherlands
tel. +31(0)33 46599877  fax. +31(0)33 46599877

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2005 09:04:04 UTC