introduction: Dan Connolly

How about we start with introductions? I'm particularly interested in

 -- a bio summarizing experience you have that's relevant to the
 work of this group

 -- as much contact info as you care to share on this public list

 -- what you expect to get out of this WG

 -- what you hope/expect to contribute.

Before W3C, I studied computer science at U.T. Austin.
I worked at Convex doing hypertext documentation
for supercomputer software; then I went to a Atrium
where I wrote a client for some their enterprise
print management system; then I went to HaL to help
them add Web smarts to the online docs for the workstation
they were building.
(more bio/vita: http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/misc/vita)

I joined W3C in March 1995. I'm a member of the TAG and the
Semantic Web Coordination Group. I edited HTML 2.0, chaired
the WG on HTML 4.0 and CSS 1, participated in the XML Schema
Working Group, served as team contact for the WG on OWL,
and chaired the RDF Data Access WG thru the Candidate
Rec of SPARQL.

I work out of my home in the Kansas City area, and I travel
to W3C meetings etc. about once a month. I don't publish
my office phone number, but I do make it available to W3C
members. Another near-real-time contact mechanism is IRC.
When I'm in office-mode, I'm generally also in
the #swig channel on freenode.
(more contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/#contact)

The premise of W3C is that working together on new Web technologies
is better than working separately. In particular, as staff contact,
my job is to see that the time each of you spends in this
group is well spent. First and foremost, our time will have been
well spent if the technology we develop gets widely deployed.
But along the way, it's important that each of us feels our
peers understand and acknowledge our contribution, even when
they do not agree. So I hope to contribute to this WG by
fostering a spirit of open and effective collaboration.

It's also my job to see that our work is consistent with
work done elsewhere in W3C: that it's accessible,
internationalized, follows Web Architecture, etc.

By way of disclosure: I have a rather personal investment
in GRDDL, having worked on it since at least as far
back as May 2003. I hope that's an asset to this group
more often than it's a liability ;-)

What I hope to get from this group is to resolve the
remaining issues in the GRDDL spec and get interoperability
among a critical mass of tools that will support a large
body of Semantic Web data. And I'd like to get a bunch
of tutorials and how-to articles that promote and support
adoption. I'd like to see lots more people finding it
cost-effective to make their data Semantic Web-friendly.

I think that eventually people will see that the
constrained RDF/XML syntax is really useful since it supports
arbitrary merging, but for first, using GRDDL to relate
existing XML dialects to the RDF abstract syntax will allow
us to use OWL and SPARQL and such with stuff like microformats,
maybe Atom, and so on.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Tuesday, 25 July 2006 16:22:58 UTC