Introduction: Ian Davis

I've been an independent consultant since about 1995 but last year was 
persuaded to join Talis, a 35+ year old library systems vendor. I've 
been working with the Semantic Web stack since about 2000 and have been 
a strong advocate for several years. I originally joined Talis to lead 
the Research Group but earlier this year I moved to lead the development 
of its new technology platform based in the web and RDF and designed for 
building large scale data-sharing applications.

I'm the (co)author of several popular RDF vocabularies and run a free 
vocabulary hosting service at vocab.org. I was a member of the original 
RSS 1.0 working group and I have substantially contributed to a open 
source RDF framework for the .NET platform called Spiral. I designed 
those FOAF faces that adorn many web pages :)

My main interest in this working group is due to some investigation I 
carried out last year into a union of microformats and RDF. I spent a 
little bit of time with the mf people and I was persuaded by several of 
their arguments about visible metadata. The result was a proposal I 
called embedded RDF (http://research.talis.com/2005/erdf/wiki) which is 
a way of embedding a subset of RDF into (X)HTML pages without inventing 
any new markup. eRDF is GRDDL-compatible and uses an XSLT 1.0 stylesheet 
to extract RDF/XML from annotated pages.

You can contact me by email ian.davis@talis.com, or by my personal email 
iand@internetalchemy.org. I am very often on IRC in #swig on freenode. 
You can MSN me at ian_alchemy@hotmail.com but I don't check email at 
that address. My skype name is ian_davis - I'll respond to textual chat, 
but probably not to voice calls without prearrangement. I blog mainly at 
http://iandavis.com/blog and I'll probably blog about GRDDL stuff there.

I live in the midlands of England near Kettering, Northamptonshire and I 
commute to Birmingham three days a week. I am generally at home on 
Mondays and Fridays so those days are my preferred ones for conference 
calls. I'm definately unavailable for calls 7-10am, 5-9pm UTC+1 on Tue, 
Wed and Thur. Very late evening or night calls are fine for me on those 
days. Very early mornings are doable but unpleasant :)

I hope to be able to help the GRDDL specification along to full 
recommendation. I would prefer not to introduce any new complexities or 
features. Basically GRDDL works for me as is, so I want only to focus on 
bug fixes and clarifications. I do think the document could do with 
refocussing with regards to the two main audiences - implementors of 
GRDDL engines and authors of GRDDLable documents.

I can contribute some editing time, research into related areas and 
possibly some unit testing work. I plan to create a test suite for eRDF 
so there may be some related work there.

Ian
-- 
http://purl.org/NET/iand
Blogging at... http://iandavis.com/blog
Working on... http://directory.talis.com/

Received on Tuesday, 25 July 2006 20:04:09 UTC