Introduction: Steve Harris

Hi,

I'm Steve Harris[1], since February of this year I've been working  
for a startup called Garlik[2]. My role is designing and helping to  
build a fast and scalable RDF store, intended to run across small  
clusters. This provides the backend storage and querying capability  
for our soon-to-be-released web frontend.

Prior to that I worked as a researcher in the Multimedia Research  
group, later to become the Intelligence Agents Multimedia[3] group of  
the University of Southampton, UK. From 1996 I was working on web  
based hypertext systems, then various other information systems,  
finally focused on semantic web based systems research around 2001.  
My main research focus became the very pragmatic end of semantic web  
research, mainly high performance triple stores[4] and RDF and  
ontology optimisation.

My technological leaning is UNIX/C hacking with a fair amount of web  
and database stuff thrown in. I've also done some audio DSP coding.

My first contribution to the W3C was as a member of the DAWG working  
group[5], helping to define the SPARQL query language. My motivation  
for joining SWEO is to help promote RDF to like-minded hacker types,  
who might otherwise be put off by the reputation for complexity that  
RDF, and the semantic web in general, seem to have gained.

ObPersonalInfo: I currently live in Southampton (on the south coast  
of England) and work in Richmond, just this side of London. I'm  
English, though I've lived in a variety of different places at  
different times. I'm an enthusiastic, i.e. not necessarily talented,  
photographer[6] and musician[I'll spare you].

- Steve

[1] http://inanna.ecs.soton.ac.uk/swh.xrdf
[2] http://www.garlik.com/
[3] http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
[4] http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11126/01/harris-ssws05.pdf
[5] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/DataAccess/
[6] http://www.flickr.com/photos/steveharris

Received on Thursday, 26 October 2006 13:39:17 UTC